Heat Wave Goodbye was published in Sand Lit Magazine in June 2009 and was a finalist in Glimmer Train Press’s 2007 Fall Short Story Contest.

It was the kind of heat that made eating popsicles impossible. The sort of heat that made everyone ten pounds heavier and always full, heat that made fragile eyes water and flowers die. It was the summer we moved to Boston. 

Our new apartment was on the second floor of an old, brick building near the North End.  It didn’t have central air conditioning, but since there were ceiling fans in almost every room, the summer heat didn’t seem like it would become a problem.  I’d grown up in a house that was cooled by the breeze, so air conditioniners were as foreign to me as the subways, sidewalks, and fire escapes that surrounded our new home.

Back in Maine it had been forty acres of forest that surrounded our house.  There was no cement, only a backyard that seemed endless and a pond that sat just before the woods became too thick to run through.  My brothers and I used the water for ice skating in the winter and for fishing in the summer. The year I turned seven, I cried on the first day the pond froze over. I didn’t stop until my oldest brother Sammy assured me that the fish were still alive on the other side of the ice. I knew I’d always believe in everything he said when the ice melted that spring and the fish were still swimming.

But our new home had no backyard, no pond to play in, and only one tiny tree that stood lonely in a cement pool outside of my second story window.  I couldn’t even walk out of the front door of our building and see the sky. Eventually sunsets became only memories and commercials for Carnival Cruises.

Living in Boston was like being trapped in one big building, and since walls were everywhere, I spent most of that summer between mine. I decorated my walls with magazine cut outs of trees and green and stapled my old blue sheets to the ceiling.

At first my mother worried.  She said that thirteen-year-old girls shouldn’t spend their summers hiding in their rooms, they should be out with friends or exploring their neighborhood.  I didn’t bother to remind her that I didn’t have much of either. 

It didn’t take long for her to give up, and eventually she seemed to envy my reclusive attitude and only ever knocked on my door to check on me before she went out with my father.  When she asked me if I needed her to stay, I could tell that she really wanted me to say yes, not because she wanted me to need her, but because she didn’t want my father to.

She always shut the door on her way out. She might have left; she might have stayed.  It made no difference. She was always gone.  I got getting good at avoiding my family’s avoidance, and not being around them made it easier to be around them.  We all seemed more comfortable alone with walls between us, and eventually I found ways to deal with quiet.

From my bed, I counted the rips in the old wallpaper, twenty two, and from my window, I numbered the cement cracks in the sidewalk, forty one to the Quick Mart.  I watched the days go by as shadows growing and then shrinking on my walls and as colors changing on the street’s stop lights.

I turned my second story window into a front row seat to the street below.  I set a stage through the glass windows of the old laundromat across from my building.  I found solice in watching the full, dirty laundry baskets become empty and then full again, folded and clean.  I spied on the people inside and made up stories about who I thought they might be. Mothers married to medical students, saving pennies for his schooling by refusing to buy washers and dryers of their own. Balding men, washing their clean clothes, hoping for a chance to talk to one of the young women who were washing their boyfriends’ boxers mixed in with their lacy lingerie. 

At first only the day customers brought entertainment, but eventually when my incessant insomnia led me to the window at night and that is where I found my most loyal companions.

There were three boys who arrived on Fridays around midnight. They were just a few years older than me, but they seemed to want to be much older.  From their body language, I could smell their cheap musk arrogance.  They were all trying to be different and tough but ended up looking the same and foolish.

Only one of the boys stood out at all because he was the tallest of the three and always wearing a Red Sox cap.

I could tell that the other two boys were brothers.  While the two never touched the taller boy, they often nudged and punched at each other, but the contact never went much further than that.

I recognized this sort of brotherly love, because I had seen it before.  My brothers Sammy and Jordan used to wrestle for hours. I would announce their matches from the staircase landing, then jump onto the floor next to them to pound my hand on the carpet three times, signaling a winner.  It was almost always Sammy. He was two years Jordan’s senior and about fifty pounds heavier, but he never hit Jordan hard enough to make him cry. It was only once that I had ever seen Sammy make Jordan cry.

There was a man that only arrived in the dead of the night, around the hour when the darkest part of the night fades. He was middle-aged, tall and broad with shoulders that looked like they must have been strong when he was younger, but now that youth seemed faded, shadowed by the receding hairline that was his most noticeable trait. 

The first time I saw him in the laundromat, he was dressed in shaggy brown slippers and a worn, gray robe with a long rip in the bottom. I watched him sit in the cold, hard, plastic chair and cry into his hands.  His whole body shook and it gave me chills.

I knew that he didn’t know I was there watching him, but I felt like I wanted him to know.  When he actually looked up, I was startled and hid behind the curtain. I waited for a few moments before I peeked back around the green fabric, and he was gone. 

I first saw the woman enter the laundromat carrying an oversized plastic bag ripping at the seams. She was the only person doing her laundry after midnight, and I think that was her intention.  She seemed to want to be alone with the clothes. 

First, she took out each article of clothing, one at a time, and placed it on the countertop.  She smoothed out the creased corners of old t-shirts and blue jeans then matched each sock with its counterpart. She took inventory of the items, calculated the worn hours of the stained sweatshirt and the minutes played by the baseball jersey.

Then, after each item had been removed from the bag, after each article had been assessed, she went outside to smoke a cigarette.  I thought women who smoked looked like movie stars. My mother called smoking a dirty habit, but I thought there was something beautiful about the fragile exhale of smoke as it floated through warm lips.  Smoke gave a shape to breathing. 

Or maybe it just reminded me of blue mornings waiting at the school bus stop.  Mornings when icicles hung like crystals from empty tree branch chandeliers. Mornings when it was almost too cold to blink.  My brothers and I would huddle together and blow circles with our breath, exhaling shapes from the invisible life within us.

But this woman didn’t blow her smoke out in circles. Instead she inhaled and exhaled hard, as thought the cigarette were her life support.  She appeared impatient, and I thought that she might be waiting for someone. Maybe a secret lover or the owner of the clothes that she seemed to love so much. I fabricated dreamy fantasies for her, thoughts I imagined she might be having. But nobody came, and after her cigarette she tossed the clothes into the washer and the dryer as though they never mattered.

I feel asleep in my window while she chain smoked and waited for the clothes to dry.

That summer, the heat helped make insomnia my hobby.  I memorized the movements like dance steps. First, I’d lay in bed on my right side, then on my left.  Flip over and stare at the ceiling, roll over again and press my face between the mattress and the pillows. Then I’d start to think, and then try not to think. My mom used to say to try to relax my tongue when I couldn’t sleep. I’d try, and it wouldn’t work.

I’d wrap the sheets around me twice. Pretend to be in a cocoon; try to turn into a butterfly. Try to dream before sleep, but that wouldn’t work either. So, I’d unroll and sprawl long across my blankets. Think about nothing, then how nothing is something. Close my eyes and wait for my consciousness to cross the line into coma. Then when I would finally get tired of waiting for sleep, I’d get out of bed.

That’s when the temperature in my room would always seem the highest.  Already in the first week of June, temperatures were reaching the eighties. It was cooler in the window.

A few weeks into the summer, the boys had a visitor.  He looked much older than them, and it was obvious that he was beyond the ages of high school.

At first they seemed annoyed by his presence, his adult status making him an immediate irritation, but then they seemed more interested and fascinated by his words.

I tried to imagine that he was a lost visitor seeking directions or a local politician hoping to meet potential voters, but he didn’t look like either of these things.           

Not even the rain could stop the heat. I waited in the window watching raindrops race down the window pane and counting the seconds between the thunder and lightning. But the temperature never dropped, just more rain.

She didn’t seem bothered by the rain and crossed the street slowly with her head down, as though she were searching for something she had lost. When she reached the doors of the laundromat, she stopped and angled her face to the sky.

She embraced the empty street, held out her hands and let the rain remind her that she could touch. I imagined that she closed her eyes and allowed the rain drops to fill in the curves around her eyelids, and for the first time in weeks, I felt cold.

I thought about watching storms from the porch steps of my old house.  How the wind warned the trees before the rain arrived by turning its leaves over and silver.  How the rain met the tree line like a wall.  I used to watch those storms from my mother’s lap. She loved the rain and used to say that the storms meant the angels were crying.

After a few moments the woman went inside and dried her hands on the inside of her jacket. She removed a crumpled envelope from her pocket.  I watched as she opened the folded paper and read the letter inside. Then read it again.  Three pages, she read over and over, until finally folding the paper and returning it to its envelope. She threw it into the garbage and left.

By mid July, the temperatures were peaking in the high 90’s.  My father bought me a used window air conditioner.  He said that the heat wasn’t good for me and that the cool air would help me fall asleep at night. I refused to use it, and eventually it became just another piece of clutter in my small room.        

I preferred my window open. Even on those hot nights when the air was so thick and humid it seemed to wrap around me like a suffocating stranger, I declined the air conditioner. The heat was worth it. If for only one or two minutes a night, I could catch the familiar breeze that used to blow through the window in my old home.  Sunflowers, fresh cut grass, and campfire smoke. It may have all been in my imagination, but I swear, some nights, I could taste Maine in my mouth and feel pollen in my eyes.

Our new city apartment never felt quite right, never like home, and although all of my old belongings sat around me, even they felt foreign. I longed for summer crickets and creaking frogs. I’d sit in my window, close my eyes, and strain my ears. Try to listen. Try to remember. I knew that somewhere out there those crickets were singing in my old backyard. Just because I couldn’t hear them didn’t mean they didn’t exist.  But I couldn’t hear them, and my ears were only met by city sounds, car alarms, and arguments.

I could hear them fighting. Their voices were loud enough to be noticed, but their message was muffled by the musty, humid air.  The two brothers were arguing with each other.  Pointing fingers and shaking fists, they battled back and forth.

At first the taller boy tried to intervene, but the brothers paid no attention.  They stared deep into each other, then a bubble formed around them, and they were alone.  The taller boy saw this and stepped back.

I strained my ears, tried to listen, but I heard only the final words come from the older brother’s mouth, “If you can’t handle it, then go home.” And he did.  

One letter in May. Three in June. Four in the first two weeks of July.

They were coming more often, varying in length. Two pages, eight, a scrap of paper, no letter, only a picture. She threw them all away.

He was back on another Sunday night.  He wasn’t crying this time. Instead, he walked tall and strong. If I hadn’t seen him the first time, I would have never believed that he was capable of those kinds of tears.  I thought no man was.

He paced, walked circles around the folding tables kicking mismatched socks around the floor.  I saw his lips moving, his hands talking.  He spoke for an hour to an imaginary companion only he could see, and when he left, he seemed sad to say goodbye to the invisible man.

Our old home had high ceilings. My brother Sammy used to put me on his shoulders and climb onto the couch, but we were still too short to reach the ceiling.  In our new apartment, I could touch the roof by standing on the tips of my toes, and for some reason that only made me feel smaller.  

The apartment was about half the size of our old house.  It had narrow hallways built with thick plaster, and doors that were always closed.  The walls were covered with stale, used wallpaper and scarred with old nail holes. I liked to try and imagine the picture frames and paintings that decorated the walls before they were ours.

My parents never redecorated or hung photos of our own, because the apartment was only supposed to be temporary.  I suppose our definitions of temporary were as different as we were, and my weeks eventually turned into their months.

Secretly I hoped we would just move back to Maine. I had always hated Boston, and even when I was kid, I would cry when my parents would take my brothers and me to the city for the weekend. But, as much as I hated Boston, my brothers loved it. 

I guessed it was because of The Red Sox. Both of my brothers were baseball stars and interested in anything that resembled four bases or a pitcher’s mound.   In the weeks before Sammy’s championship little league game, he slept with his mitt on his hand every night.  He didn’t care about the red marks it made on his wrist or the smells it left on his pillow. After his team won the game, he said it was all worth it.

But now that we were in Boston, so close to Fenway, no one was talking about baseball. And for the first time ever, I missed ninth innings and home runs.

After the argument, only one of the brothers came back to the laundromat. The younger brother went missing.  It made me sad to think about two brothers estranged, two brothers separated.

 The other boys didn’t seem to mind his absence.  Instead they talked among themselves and smoked cigarettes one after another. The taller of the two exhaled the smoke in circles, while the smaller attempted but always failed.

 The boys weren’t always alone.  The older man returned often.  They would talk briefly, spending most of the time paying attention to the other people on the street.  Then, when the street finally felt empty enough, they would trade brown paper bags and act like strangers.

There was no end to the heat wave, and two weeks after the weatherman had predicted a cold front, the heat was still breaking records.  It was 89 degrees at midnight when she came to write her letter.

She wore a white, flowing, summer dress, the kind that I remembered from Maine but had not seen since our move.  Not even the weightless fabric of her dress could compete with the intense gravity of the humidity, and it hung motionless around her and stuck to parts of her skin.

She went inside and sat down at the nearest table. She wrote on stationary that came out of a box.  The sort of stationary my mother used to give to me to write thank you notes to my grandparents or aunts and uncles after Christmas or my birthday.

She wasted half the box, scribbling words on purple paper that she balled up then threw onto the floor. She worked her words out on the paper, and it took her about an hour before she finally seemed satisfied.

Then she collected the scraps of papers from the floor, words that would never be read, and threw them into the garbage. I imagined that after she left, she walked the two blocks toward the post box and sent her words away with a kiss or two.

During the first week of August, my parents went on a trip to Maine. I begged them to take me, but they refused. Only my father seemed to feel a slight remorse in his refusal and promised, at least, to bring me back chocolates from my favorite gift shop.

Without my parents, the apartment wasn’t much different. Their absence was as empty as their presence, and I barely noticed that they were gone.  It didn’t bother me. I was good at getting used to things. Dreaming kept me comfortable, and I found ways to avoid the empty apartment. I had company.

 The two boys were at the laundromat more than usual that weekend. And now, varieties of people stopped to talk to them.  Kids my age arrived in nervous pairs, while irrational adults showed up alone.  Those visitors become their customers, and the boys turned into salesmen.  They sold anti-innocence to teenage boys trying to be men, and false youth for grown men trying to be boys.  Their product was a temporary relief to nameless pains or an eraser for memories with roots too permanent for time.

When my parents returned on Monday, they were talking even less that usual.  It seemed as though my father had left my mother in Maine.  I had never seen her so far away, up close, and it made me understand the definition of distance.

My mother didn’t stay long, and left again on Thursday.  My father didn’t say why and only promised that this time she would return with my chocolates he had forgotten.  That weekend, the apartment was quiet again, and except for the heat, the space felt empty.  The temperature was still increasing, and it was impossible to escape the heat. Even cold baths turned warm in minutes.  

But I needed him that night, so I waited in the window, watching the ice melt in my glass of iced tea.  His presence relaxed me. Seeing him sitting across the street was like what being tucked into bed used to feel like. 

When he finally showed up, he seemed exhausted and fell into one of the plastic chairs as though he had just finished an epic journey.  His legs kicked out from under him and his chin met his chest.  He was catching his breath, bracing himself.

With his head still to the ground, he pulled an envelope from his pocket.  He fingered the corners of the tattered paper before finally ripping the flap from its adhesive. The letter breathed in, he exhaled.

He lifted his head, looked left, then right, as though the real owner of the letter might be coming at any second. But there was only him, and he read the paper over twice. Once, quickly, he ran through the pages, looking for something obvious. Then a second time, he focused on each letter, trying to break in imaginary code, searching for answers to questions he would never ask.

My mother didn’t return on Monday or Tuesday, and by Saturday I stopped expecting her.  No one seemed worried, and the rest of the house went about their lives as usual.  At least that is what it sounded like from my room.  

That Saturday the heat became almost unbearable, and for the first time ever I considered placing the air conditioner in my window.  But something told me not to.

So I sat in the window, painting my fingernails red and green. It wasn’t time for Christmas, but I wished that it was. I wanted to decorate Christmas trees and eat gingerbread men and catch snowflakes on my tongue.  I wanted it to be cold again.

I was surprised when all three of the boys returned to their spot. Although I didn’t know the brothers personally, I received a sort of satisfaction by watching them together again, brothers reunited.

They went about their business as usual, and their customers came and went quickly.  The smaller brother seemed to have accepted their practice and laughed as the boys collected their easy money.

I had just started on my toes when their final visitors of the night arrived. There were three of them. They were much bigger than the boys and appeared to be much older.

I could feel the fight before it happened, and I guess that is why I yelled for my dad before the first fist was thrown.  He came running into my room, half awake, wearing his old tattered bathrobe, the one with the rip on near the bottom.

I felt stuck, frozen in the heat, I couldn’t do anything but watch the fight from my window. My father tried to pull my brother from pile, but his weak arms weren’t enough against the strength of the group. But he tried hard and fought back for his only son.

The fight lasted only a few minutes before the blue and red lights flickered into my window.  They cuffed my brother before they took him away, and one cop allowed my father to ride in the front seat on the way to the station.

Before he got in, my father looked up to my window. He saw me watching. He looked down to his feet, then back up to me again. He saw me watching.

I spent a lot of time watching my family from the outside of the inside. I saw them when they couldn’t even see themselves.  It started a few months ago, when my brother Sammy died. While the rest of my family stopped looking at each other, I saw them closer, my eyes turned into magnifying glasses, and I couldn’t look away.

In public, I watched them go through the typical motions. My mother welcomed the sympathy of other parents, who were secretly grateful it was not their son who died in the baseball team’s bus accident. My father smiled at his memorial when the other captains of the baseball team promised to win states in Sammy’s honor, and even Jordan seemed sincere when he promised the rest of the team that he would be back to play next year.

Then behind the closed doors of our home, I watched my mother cry herself to sleep in piles of Sammy’s clothes, and my father rip the newspaper to pieces, even though my brother’s picture was placed in remembrance next to the team’s championship photo. And I was there watching when my brother Jordan burned his glove in the old barrel in our backyard.

I watched my family mourn and retract into themselves, like a piece of paper being folded over too many times. Then, I heard them stop talking to each other. We weren’t a family anymore. We were four strangers moving around each other as though our house were an obstacle course of memories.

My parents thought moving to Boston would distance them from their feelings.  They wanted to run from the memories.  The same smells of sunflowers, fresh cut grass, and campfire smoke that made me feel closer to my brother, made them feel farther away.

So when school ended, my parents moved us to Boston. A new city, new apartment, new life, those things were supposed to make us forget. The distance was supposed to push us far away. It did.

I started to notice my mother not noticing my father, paying more attention to the letters from another man, an old family friend whom I knew she went home to meet. I saw Jordan start sneaking out at night, his bloodshot eyes, and new expensive designer tennis shoes.  And I saw my father miss Sammy, something he refused to show to anyone else.

They hid from each other. The world turned into a mirror, and it became too hard for them to see themselves in each other, too hard for them to see the family in each other’s eyes, too hard for them to see each other without Sammy.

But I saw them.

The phone rang a little while after the cop car pulled away.  It was my mother.  She had been close to the apartment and was on her way to the police station. She sounded worried, and for the first time in months, I heard emotion in my mother’s voice.

My dad was right. The air conditioner helped.  I turned the fan on high and hit my bed like an avalanche. I could have slept for weeks. It felt like I slept for months, years, lifetimes.

I dreamt about Sammy. Early memories, when I couldn’t say Samuel, so to make me feel better the rest of my family started calling him Sammy.  I dreamt about his hands and how they always seemed so much bigger than mine.  His finished math homework and how I couldn’t wait to know everything he did.

I dreamt about the last time I saw him, standing in front the school bus decorated with his high school team’s logo. He hugged me in front of his friends, and it made me feel proud that he wasn’t embarrassed.

He was only supposed to be gone for a few weeks on a trip with his team to a baseball camp in Vermont. Jordan was so jealous he couldn’t go.  Just one more year, then he would finally be on the varsity team with Sammy.  To make him feel better, Sammy took off his Red Sox cap and plopped it onto Jordan’s head before boarding the bus. He was only supposed to be gone for a few weeks.

When I finally woke up, I heard something I hadn’t heard in months, voices. I thought I might still be dreaming, so I turned off the air conditioner and listened.  Sounds from the kitchen, I heard forks hitting plates, a laugh, an echo. Together sounds.

I opened my door slowly and walked down the hallway toward the kitchen on my tiptoes. I tried to be quiet, like a ghost.  I heard my mother start to cry. In gentle sobs she said she was around the corner at a hotel the whole time.  She should have never left and would never leave us again. In the quiet second that followed, I imagined that she hugged my brother. 

The floorboard creaked and I stepped back, afraid they might hear me listening.  They didn’t.  I heard my brother apologize, and both of my parents forgive him. He promised to never do it again, and because they had no reason not to, they believed him.

I pressed myself up against the wall just before the kitchen door. So close. Then I heard my dad say “Sammy.”  All of the words surrounding his name faded. All I heard was Sammy, and it echoed into the empty part of my heart that missed hearing it.  It was the first time I’d heard my dad say his name since his death.

I leaned back against the wall and braced myself. I felt like a melting icicle. I wanted to see my family seeing each other again. I stepped into the kitchen. 

They were sitting around the kitchen table and it smelled like banana pancakes. When my mother pushed her chair away from the table it squeaked against the old tile floor.  She embraced me and it felt like the first drop of rollercoaster. I started to cry when my father hugged me, and even more when Jordan did.

We spent the rest of the day talking and crying and living, together. We ate pancakes, and talked like we were old friends back from a journey of distances too far for maps.

The Red Sox had a new pitcher.  Our old house still hadn’t sold. Sammy would have hated our apartment.  My father removed the window air conditioner and allowed the breeze to blow through the curtains. The heat wave was finally over.

Heat Wave Goodbye was published in Sand Lit Magazine in June 2009 and was a finalist in Glimmer Train Press’s 2007 Fall Short Story Contest.