They moved to Chicago because of their son and what their son did to that girl. Their new house looked like anybody else’s, only it was emptier, and without family photographs, because Alice threw out their pictures before the move. Alice’s friend Judy said the Midwest was supposed to have big and honest people in it who didn’t go nosing around in others’ lives. Judy said, “You have moved to a place that has a large and healing heart.” Has she ever been here? Michael asked. Does she even know where Chicago is? Neither Alice nor Michael needed jobs right away. Their savings would be enough for a while, based on their inexpensive tastes and also on the lack of Jake, who was their only son. Without a child, life was a bargain. Everything seemed on sale. Michael said other people dreamed of living like this.
A month after the move, Alice signed up to be a role model to an inner-city youth. “Since when do you care about black kids?” Michael asked. But she needed something to do with her time, something more than gardening, and she had seen the advertisement in the paper, a woman of Alice’s age looking satisfied as she clutched a dark-skinned girl to her, while the girl looked up at the woman with an enormous love. Alice remembered Jake, too young to speak, looking at her like that—his clear eyes speaking to her. “I believe in your love,” his eyes said. Her hand cupped his head. A tired caseworker sat in their kitchen and passed Alice a picture of a skinny twelve-year-old in tight braids, laughing at something outside of the photograph. “She’s too old,” Alice said. The caseworker said everybody wanted a younger child so they were all taken. “Her name is Alissa and she needs you,” the caseworker said. Alice pictured the girl with the eyes of an infant. She pictured the girl looking up with love in her eyes. It was August by this point, the sky hard and blue, and squirrels had begun chewing through the wood of their garage. “Let them,” Alice told Michael, feeling kind-hearted, saving this, saving that, until she spotted Michael, in the backyard, chasing down the squirrels with a fierce and focused intensity, an iron rod in his hands.
In this new life, Alice thought her son would become an afterthought, hardly worth the mention, but even on the drives away from the city, where the landscape became obvious, a flat obvious surface, with nothing to hide, and nowhere to hide things, there Jake was, hiding. His hands over his eyes. “Can you find me?” he said. “Find me, find me!” They were driving west to someplace, the sun in their eyes, and Michael was talking to her again. Alice, listen, he said. Michael was saying shit happened to everybody. And did she think everybody walked around like she was, like a sad clown with shit all over her face? “People are more than their tragedies,” Michael said. He was full of big talk that year.
Michael said all along he would not set a foot in jail to visit their son, so, in their old life, Alice had gone alone three weeks after the arrest. Jake already looked different, paler, and his hands—had they always been like that? How they appeared stronger than necessary now. She asked what he ate for breakfast. How he slept. “How do you think I sleep?” Jake said. The new and sterilized smell of him, the smell of disinfectant covering a gray and possibly rotting thing underneath. “Are you all right?” she asked. According to police reports, Jake had done what he did, and then he packed his linen shirts and swimming trunks and joined Alice and Michael in the Caribbean, their first family vacation in years, to celebrate the new year, where they all had a fine time, eating bowls of shellfish in the sun. Things had been more beautiful there. Everything. Paradise? Alice asked, and Jake leaned over to place a shrill red flower in her hair. He was shirtless and young and people turned to watch him. I made him! she remembered thinking. There is my son and I made him, I made this radiant person!
“Listen to me,” Jake said to Alice, his voice an unnatural whisper. “I’ve heard about people having sex here.”
“What? Where?” Alice asked. She forced herself to touch her son. She put her hand on his arm.
“In the visiting rooms. Right here.”
“How? Why would you say something like that?”
“I’m telling you because it’s true,” Jake said. He leaned back in his chair and covered his eyes with his hands. In Alice’s wallet was a folded picture of the girl. The photo was cut from a newspaper article that called Jake a monster. She meant to show her son the photograph. She wanted to watch her son as he studied the girl’s picture. She wanted him to cry as he gently—gently!—touched the girl’s face. Jake said, “I’m telling you because maybe someone here is having sex right now and we don’t even know it.” He was not crying. Why was he not crying? Alice told her son he would be okay. “I promise you’ll be okay,” she said. Her mouth pressed to Jake’s infant ear, inhaling the milky smell of him, which was also her smell. “What are you talking about?” Jake said. “You’ll be okay,” Alice repeated. She remembered he had drifted to sleep in her arms and she promised him all sorts of things.
When they first arrived to Chicago, just the two of them, Michael said doesn’t this feel like it used to? They were to start over here. “Let bygones be bygones,” Michael explained. “It was a necessary free for all. I understand that. We did what was needed to survive.” “But what did you do?” Alice asked. “Other than sleeping in our guest bedroom, what did you do?” There was supposed to be forgiveness. As if to prove this, before they finished their unpacking, boxes stacked in the hallway, bare mattresses in the bedrooms, Michael organized a romantic getaway, the sort of thing, he assured Alice, that childless people do all the time. He held her hand during the drive north to Wisconsin until they arrived. “Michael, this place is amazing,” Alice said, though the woods looked as expected, they looked like any woods. That first night in their lodge suite, Alice dreamed of Jake. He stood beside the kitchen sink, wiping down the unbroken dishes with a tea towel. It was a boring dream. Ordinary light. Shadows and dark and so on. There he was. There.
The following morning, Michael busied himself at the fireplace, stacking logs into a teepee, like this was the Boy Scouts, stuffing outdated newspapers between the logs, lighting a match, blowing until the fire took hold. He told Alice to lie down. “I brought something for you,” he said. He held out a black zippered bag and inside the bag were straps, handcuffs, a gag, clothespins, a lighter, and some latex things she had never seen before. “What is this, Michael?” Alice asked. He piled the objects in the center of the bed. “You don’t know how hard it is to find some of this stuff,” he said, not looking at her.
“You thought I couldn’t do this but I can do this, if this is what you want. Show me what to do.” Alice reached for Michael’s hand. How much must two people go through together? What were the requirements?
“I told you. I was trying to make sense of something then,” she began.
“Do you want me to hit you?” Michael said. “Do you think that guy was the only one who could leave a mark on you?”
Judy called Alice and said a door never closed without another door opening. She said when she thought of Alice—“and I’ve been thinking about you, I have”—all she could think of was this Oprah show where a newborn baby boy had only a few weeks to live, so the parents videotaped the baby every day that he was alive, an hour each day, or two hours, knowing each day was a gift. “I think it would help if you watched that show,” Judy said. “It was so joyful, how they did it. It was not about grief. It was about appreciating what you used to have.”
Their son had, on the day after Christmas, in a Days Inn off the New York Thruway, murdered a call girl. Not the expensive type that politicians apparently used, but a girl with bargain rates, a not even pretty girl, somewhat overweight, who advertised in the back of the free weeklies. She looked—in the photograph the newspaper kept running—like a kid who had been awake for too long, with blown-out hair and exhausted eyes.
The motive of the murder remained unknown. Shooting the call girl with the gun pressed to her cheek was not enough. Shots in the knees and the ankles and the stomach. Knife marks along her inner thighs. The broken ribs and teeth marks and the bruises. “Did you?” Alice asked. Images of Jake as a child crowded her mind: her son, two years old, in tears, because the cars in the picture book had crashed again, apples and oranges and the rabbit drivers suspended in the air. “That is a stupid question,” Jake said. His semen down the girl’s throat. Pictures of the ruined girl on his phone. Because of the girl’s black mother, the question of race was considered. Did Jake hate black people? Or people of mixed race? Or did he simply hate all women? Alice had no idea. “Fix it,” two-year-old Jake demanded, so Alice took the book and turned back to the beginning.
They called her son a monster on the news. “Mom, get me out of here,” Jake said. But she had no idea how. She had not been given the resources. The correct resources must have been given to other mothers. More women came forth. It appeared Jake had wide and varied sexual tastes. It appeared Jake had a habit of going too far. When pressed for details by a reporter, one of the sex workers cried, remembering the things Jake made her do. What had Alice forgotten to teach her son? She closed her eyes. There Jake was, rubbing his pudgy fingers against the sad rabbit’s face, as if it were a real rabbit and not a picture of a rabbit. Petting the page like she had shown him, his little hand careful and cupped. “Good,” Alice told him. Another call girl said, “I guess I’m lucky to be alive.”
Alice took the girl to a working farm that smelled like animal shit. The smell embarrassed Alissa, who barely spoke the whole outing, despite the constant questions Alice asked, the conversation starters suggested by the volunteer agency. The girl did not answer any of them. How did one speak to a child again? But when Alice asked should they do something the next weekend, Alissa nodded. So the following Saturday, they canoed across a lake with nothing visible in it. Alissa asked what the point of a lake was without fish in it. She had hoped to see fish. Alice had told her there would be fish. Wherever they went, there were rarely other black people around, but Alice was not sure what could be done about that. Along the piers, men cast out fishing lines into the water then tugged their bare lines back. Alice paddled the canoe to the lake’s center, where she eased the oars out of the water, allowing the boat to rock, and then, to her surprise, Alissa began to sing. Her voice was steady and hopeful; it sounded like someone else’s voice, though the song itself was an odd choice—it was a song for grownups, popular years ago. The song was about a person viewed from a great distance, far enough away so no one could see the details of this person, but they were luminous somehow anyway. If I dreamed about you, would you become true? At night, in bed, Alice pictured a protective light in her hands, like she was a god or something, shining warmth and light all around the girl. She pictured herself cradling Alissa and singing quiet but powerful promises into the girl. That was the summer: the blank and dry wind, the urine in their yard from the strays, the daffodils with their yellow heads knocked off.
The man had said his name was Oz. He was the produce clerk at the grocery store back in their old neighborhood out east. Alice liked how he watched her, like he did not care who she was but he was watching her because he cared about something else outside of her, something fantastical and garish flashing around her head. After Jake’s arrest, Alice finally agreed to meet him at a motel in the afternoon, the room lit by a thin but direct sunlight. Oz’s eyes moved from her breasts to the television then back to her breasts. “You need to be rough with me,” Alice said. Or else she would leave. That was the whole point of it. She expected him to protest, though he didn’t. He pressed his mouth hard against her ear. “You remember what you asked for when we’re done here,” he told her, and his voice sounded like a public alarm, controlled yet capable of causing panic.
Every few days, Oz chose the motel and paid cash for a room that looked identical to the room before. His hands near her neck, teasing at her collarbone, her windpipe. “I wish I could see the inside of your throat,” he said. His hand crushed her mouth if she made a sound at certain times. “No sounds now,” he said. Alice pictured a black bull on an inadequate leash. A lot of fraying ropes holding down something that could not be roped. The wrecked sheets, and the sounds of the sheets, ripping. All her life she had been told violence of such sorts should have looked rotted out, an old cellar with a busted light that no one wanted to descend into or admit, the sort of thing you turned away from, but it wasn’t like that. It looked like any other place. It looked like any other thing. Not shoved into the shadows but crowing. There was something good here, she was sure of it, something understandable and human amid all that force. Then he used his teeth on her, she did not know where, she felt only her skin giving in to the edges of his teeth, and she was elsewhere, in an overwhelmed place made of rabid color.
Once, in the middle of it, she opened her eyes, and in the corner of the motel room, in a mirror, she glimpsed her son. Jake had dressed up for this. He was wearing a button-down shirt and a tie. His hair was smoothed down and side parted. He was holding his hands very still. He was holding his hands like they wanted to be doing something else but he needed to keep them still. It wasn’t as simple as the light and the dark. Jake watched her and nodded, with a look of sad approval, with sympathy, at what went on there.
Alice was supposed to be her son’s character witness in court. This was in their old life, of course. In their new life, Alice barely had a son, while in their old life, their son had a public defender, because of his credit card debt and Michael’s refusal to pay legal fees. The defender’s name was Jill and she said, “Alice, I need you to come to court and talk about your son’s integrity.” Jill needed Alice to keep three specific examples in mind. “Do you understand me? I need you to talk about him now, as an adult. Convince me and everyone else how he is a kind and loving man. Why he is good. Can you do that? Listen,” Jill said, “I think you, as the mother of the accused, speaking honestly from the heart about your son, it will really help here.” It was nearing dusk, the outside falling into the dark. Good riddance. Alice preferred the house when she could see nothing out of it. “Do you understand? Or else you can go ahead and give up on him,” Jill said. “You can give your son up to the wolves if that’s what you prefer.”
Alissa lived with a cousin now. She and her mother were evicted from their apartment, they had spent a few nights in a homeless shelter, and now Alissa slept on the floor, in a closet. “Can I come stay with you?” Alissa asked, and Alice had to explain, uncomfortably, “Now is not a good time. There are a lot of things going on and it’s not a good time.” Alissa said her cousin wouldn’t let her sleep with a pillow. If she went to sleep with a pillow, then her cousin came over in the dark and pulled the pillow from under her head. “Honey, it’s okay to be frightened,” Alice said. “But I’m not,” Alissa said. “I’m not frightened.”
When Judy called that week, she told Alice to stop worrying about other people. She said worrying about other people’s problems was the number one way to avoid dealing with your own problems. “You need to care for yourself now,” Judy said. She told Alice how every single event in your life is an opportunity to choose love over fear.
Michael found out about the affair eventually. When, in her old life, Alice allowed herself to be led upstairs, to their old bedroom, Michael said, “I promise we’ll be enough for each other.” He said, “Jesus, Alice, I’ve missed you.” For the last month he had slept in the guest bedroom, since that phone call from Jake had come in the middle of the night. They had barely looked at each other since. Michael said, “Look at me,” holding her face between his hands so she either had to look at him or close her eyes. She closed her eyes. He smelled of a floral and pale soap. He touched her with such gentleness it was like he wasn’t touching her. Eventually Michael noticed the bruises, of course he did. He kissed the first bruise he saw on her, and the second. “What have you done to yourself?” he said, laughing, until he saw how many there were. Dozens of them, of varying colors and sizes, starting above her knees and trailing up to her hips. A look of surprise and something else on Michael’s face. The look of a person waking up from a dark dream into the dark. She struggled to pull up her skirt, but Michael had moved on, unbuttoning her shirt as she turned from him, so he saw more of them, the dark bruises on her abdomen and, beneath her bra, the marks across her right breast. Alice shoved his hand away. He yanked her underwear down. The sun’s insistence of brightness in the room. The lack of shadows and the lack of the dark. When Jake was an infant, she walked around holding him in her arms, believing everyone must be filled with this buoyant kindness, everyone must be brimming with this warm generic light. But people had all sorts of things inside of them. “Go ahead,” Alice said to Michael. Around them, cracking, the heat of something sharper-scented. Michael didn’t look at her, he looked at his hands. He broke several things from the dresser, things of no apparent value, before leaving the room and slamming the bedroom door. When Alice tried to follow him, she found the door barricaded from the hallway. She sat on the bed, it must have been an hour or two, until she grew hungry, and then she pounded on the door until her fists stung from pounding the door. Whose forgiveness was needed here, and for what? She tried the door again, and this time it opened without resistance.
When they moved to Chicago, she wrote her son a letter. “We are in a new place now!” she wrote. “We are in a place of promise and wonderment. Anything can happen here. I wake up in the morning every day and I think to myself, today will be different.” She was trying to give her son hope. She was trying to teach him something. She did not inform her son of their new address, but she included other personal details in her letter. “Our new house is yellow. You would find it funny because all the other houses on our block are brown or white and then here we are, the bright yellow house. Don’t you think that must mean something?” She wrote how she was a mentor to an African American pre-teen (“would you believe it, Jake? But I am doing a good job of it”). And how her husband, “your father,” she wrote, now snored at night, loudly, like something oddly shaped had lodged in his chest, something that would not come out, so Alice had started sleeping in the spare bedroom, “on your old mattress,” she wrote. They had gotten rid of almost everything that belonged to their son, but the mattress—it was organic. They had paid a lot of money for it. Nothing had started to sag on it yet. So they had dragged it across the country with them. Instead of their son, she had a mattress, where she lay in the evening, face down, without sheets, her face against the pillow top, remembering her son. She remembered how Jake had surprised her once, pursing his lips to give her the first of one hundred small kisses. One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven! Eight! “Enough!” Alice had laughed, pushing him away, as if the flawless kisses would go on.
“You sound like you need a good fuck,” Judy said over the phone.
“Oh, we’re fine,” Alice said. “All of us here are just fine.” They weren’t in the movies for God’s sake. Nobody was radiant anymore.
But larger problems appeared all around Alissa like gnats, like tiny viscous bugs. Problems that Alice had no idea about. “There’s a gang of white boys,” Alissa said in the car, on the way home from a modeling call she begged to attend. “They follow me home after school. They threw mud on me.” The audition had been a scam, a way to entrap poor black kids into expensive classes that promised you nothing. Alissa wanted to sign up anyway, though Alice talked instead about focusing one’s energy on reality, on what’s possible. “What, like basketball?” Alissa said. “All you white people keep telling me I should play basketball.” Alice stopped listening. She nodded as if she was listening, but she wasn’t. What were you thinking, Michael asked, lying again when Alissa called.
Room #27. The Rest Haven Motel. It was not a pretty place but she did not need it to be. The room was dark and they left it dark. This was the day of Jake’s court hearing. Certain people expected her to be there on the stand, in a suit, testifying to her son’s good character. She said this out loud and Oz laughed at her, sprawled naked on the bed, the old bruises on her legs mixed with the new marks he had left. “Oh you mothers,” Oz said, laughing.
She told Oz to tie the blindfold around her eyes again and, as he pulled the cloth tight, she thought—I am handing Jake to the wolves. What an odd old expression, though she could see herself doing so: knotting the coarse rope around her son’s waist, gagging his mouth with a clean rag, the final glimpse of his face—how he always looked like her!—before she lowered the hood around his head. Wondering, can’t we all forget what happened and start over? Can’t we all chop off our hands and be done with it? However, it was not done. Alice lowered the hood on her son (“Is this what you wanted?” Oz asked her. “Is this what you wanted me to do?”) in the blunt light, in a plaza of direct light, so everyone could watch if they wanted. She understood what she did, and there was some relief in this. No more trying to do one thing but actually doing another. No loving and years of attentive loving to find out she raised a thing she didn’t want—a thing no one in their right mind would want—but she had to want it, and find it beautiful, though no one in their right mind would find it beautiful. Alice let her son stumble and fall onto the road because people thought he deserved this. She helped him up then let him stumble again until his trousers tore, his left knee exposed, bruised and bloodied, parading him past all the houses, all the windows with the cracks in the drapes and the people looking through the cracks, her love for her son dragging after her, like a smashed up cat shackled to her left ankle, attracting flies and the titters of the neighbors. She was glad people were watching, so they saw she did what was expected (“I bet your husband wants to know the kind of things you like,” Oz whispered. “I bet you don’t do this stuff with him, do you. I bet he has no idea”), how she led her son into the darkening forest, where she chose a rotted tree and she tied him to that tree with additional lengths of rope. From his mouth came a suffocated sound, but she did not remove the cloth from his mouth. He looked like her son. He looked like a child again. She kissed every finger of his right hand. She kissed his palm (“What kind of noise is that?” Oz said, laughing. “Shut up. Someone will think I’m raping you, Jesus, shut up”), then she left him, as the dusk and the dark and the cold came. She left her son hooded, gagged, and tied to a rotting tree, as the howls of the wolves began at the near borders. Because she was not one of those mothers who could change the course of things. She wished she was but she wasn’t. (“I want to keep seeing you, Alice,” Oz whispered into her hair. “I want to see you for a long time.”) Everybody is supposed to get a second chance, someone older and wrong once told her.
Michael said he never had pretensions about the challenges of a long term marriage. He was not one to sugar coat. If the glass was half empty, then let’s call it that, he said. And he understood the statistics, which allowed very few a hope in hell to create a lasting and permanent relationship. But hadn’t they had raised a son together? Hadn’t they known each other for years before raising that child? “How long have we known each other by this point, Alice?” he asked. They had years ahead of them, and those things that were done? He didn’t want to talk about those things anymore, other than to say they should view those things as being done by other people. “You have no idea what’s inside a person,” Alice said. Michael ignored her. He said he believed in their strong foundation. He believed if a foundation was strong enough, it didn’t matter what it covered up. He said this as if quoting a wise man, as if preaching from some holy book to a large and accepting crowd, though there was just Alice in front of him. He knelt beside her, and as if offering her a gift, he opened his hands, though there was nothing in them. He looked ridiculous and exposed like that, with his sadness and his empty hands. “Look, I am grieving here,” he said to her. He said this as if his grief should have been an object she could see. As if it were a bright dust, settling onto his shoulders and his face, and onto Alice now too, onto her lips and her neck, and her feet too, and elsewhere.
The previous spring, Alissa hadn’t wanted to go, but Alice took her anyway, to an Easter Egg hunt held in a puny forest south of the city, Alissa complaining she was too old for such shit. “If you’re too old, then what about me?” Alice asked. Alissa rolled her eyes but she was laughing, her face open and attentive, as they joined the colorful crowd of children. There were streamers in the trees, and a musician who played shrill songs on his flute. The sun illuminated the forest. “This is a magical place,” a volunteer said to them, to welcome them, and Alice felt welcomed. She felt Jake at her side, his small hand lost in her hand.
Were Jake still a child, and beside her, Alice would have told him look, pointing here, and here, and here. Look, the trees are budding. It’s spring, she would have said, lifting him so she could carry his weight and he could feel the tight hard green buds of a maple tree. She had tried to create the perfect world for her son. If anyone needed proof of her love, if anyone questioned did she love her son enough, this was her proof. Of course she would have chosen some kinder place, a place with better lighting, but she worked with what she was given, and if, in the distance, there had been a glittering edge? If she heard snarls of certain animals, the red smear at the far grass, the shadows dancing suggestively with mock violence? Who wouldn’t have turned away, to pretend such things could not belong there. She remembered, once, kneeling close to Jake, at his level. She knelt behind him and held him, and faced the same direction he faced, and she watched him. She could not see what he saw, but she wanted to see. She wanted to see a world overwhelmed and protected by her love. Jake’s look was delicate, but certain too, and full of faith. What was he believing in then? She assumed he was watching something with goodness in it, though perhaps she was mistaken.
The eggs were not particularly well hidden. They were on the path, or right beside the path, unnaturally colored pinks and blues and yellows. Alissa picked up one egg and placed it in her pocket. She took another, then a third, causing the volunteer to frown. “Is this your child?” the volunteer asked. “Of course not,” Alice said. From a hidden place, a bird repeated the same penetrating note and something about the sound, the pure sameness of the note, made Alice recall Jake, asleep in her arms, his head tipped back against her breast, his little mouth still sucking, with peaceful certainty. She had felt then like she was holding herself, the best parts of herself.
Alissa was talking to her now. “Tell me again,” Alice asked, straining to pay attention, and Alissa told of a dream of her mother’s, about a house sent to them by God. “My mom said the house has a fence so we can get a dog. My mom’s been praying and then God told her everything.” “It sounds like a nice house,” Alice said. And why not? She could picture the mother and girl in a devastated place, where nothing they needed was there, so the mother handed her child imaginary things, because this was what mothers did when there was nothing else to be done. The girl held each imagined thing as if it were real, and why not? “We are in a magical place, Alissa. Did you know that? You are in a magical and shining place,” Alice said to the girl. The world looked as it always did, but she repeated herself, hoping Alissa would believe her. Alissa waved her hands as if swatting away flies. She said, “Okay, I get it, okay.” The signs pointed deeper into the woods. “This way to the Easter Bunny!” the signs read. It was ridiculous, of course it was—a man in a rabbit costume, asking each child what she wanted, then offering in return a bag of six jelly beans—but something needed to be believed in here. There Jake was, beside her in the warm light of her love, believing in things. The girl led the way, and Alice continued to follow.
“The Move” was originally published in New England Review and was acknowledged as a distinguished story by Best American Mystery Stories. It has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
Debbie Urbanski’s fiction has been published in the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, Nature: the International Weekly Journal of Science, the Southern Review, The Sun, Tin House’s Open Bar, the UK science fiction magazines Interzone and Arc (from New Scientist), and Interfictions. She has been awarded residencies from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and holds a MFA from Syracuse University. Find her online at or .
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