Strawberries

“Heart of the Warren” by DARKRECONSTRUCTION

The strawberries hung from the window box like wet rubies, begging to be plucked. I reached up, picked the two ripest, and popped them in my mouth. They were just the right amount of soft, and sweeter than anything.

Niall tugged my elbow. He’d jogged up behind me, backpack bobbing. We didn’t usually go down this street, but construction blocked our usual route to school.

“Gimme one!”

Niall’s voice had that threatening, whiny edge to it, so I picked two more and dropped them into his cupped hands. Pink juice dribbled down his chin as he chewed. He never could keep his mouth shut.

“What if someone sees?” he mumbled, through the strawberries. “What if we go to jail?”

Niall was always dreaming up conspiracies. Whenever it rained, he was convinced a tsunami would hit us, even though we lived a hundred miles from the ocean. He still believed in Santa and the Tooth Fairy, and thought good things happen to good people. I, on the other hand, had just turned 10. I knew how the world worked.

“Look,” I said. “If you grow strawberries right here on the street, what do you expect? No one will know.”

To prove the point, I reached up and picked another.

***

Just after lunch, our teachers sent us to the Principal’s office. Auntie was waiting in the parking lot. When she told us, Niall didn’t cry—just balled up in the back seat and stared.

“It’s our fault.” His voice was eerie and calm. He kept licking his top lip, tongue darting in and out like a lizard’s. “We did it.”

“Don’t be stupid.” I shoved him, harder than I meant to. “It was an accident.” 

The policeman who came to Auntie’s house told us that the driver who’d crossed the median strip into our Mom had been intoxicated. He said the car, the one that did it, was red. 

***

I hated staying with Auntie, even though she baked snickerdoodles and let us watch cartoons till late. Everything in her house felt sticky. Her hugs were warm, perfumey prisons. Niall and I had to share a bed, and he whimpered every time a car passed the window.

“I can’t sleep, Jamie.” He scrabbled around under the sheets.

“Neither can I, when you’re yapping.”

He shifted again. Springs creaked.

“Tell me a story?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I can never think of an ending.”

***

When we were allowed to visit the hospital the next day, Auntie stopped at the donut shop. She left her cigarette, still lit, on the roof of the car, to save for the rest of the drive.

“We all deserve a treat, don’t you think?”

I wasn’t hungry. My belly had shrunk to the size of a pebble. Auntie ordered two Crullers, and Niall ate his jelly donut right there in the shop, smearing red goop up both cheeks. I traced a coffee stain on the floor with my toe. Niall didn’t know anything about anything. This had nothing to do with us.

Mom couldn’t eat her Cruller. When we arrived, she was asleep, drinking serums that leaked straight into her arm. I stood against the wall as the doctor told us she may have lost brain functioning. Lost, like no one was sure where to look. I wondered what she was dreaming about, lying there, the machines breathing for her. Was she searching for us?

A nurse with a mole on her chin came in holding a bag of blood. The liquid inside ebbed back and forth. I tried not to look, and asked if I could go the bathroom.

That night, after Niall was asleep, I went through Auntie’s desk drawer and found a notecard, with flip-flops printed in the corner. In my best cursive I wrote: We are so sorry about the strawberries. They weren’t ours to take. Also, they were very good. Sincerely, Jamie Gilligan Reed. 

I felt a little better, though I still couldn’t sleep. Niall kept hogging the sheets.

***

The following afternoon, while Niall and Auntie made mac and cheese over the stove, I slipped out the back door and down the block. In the window box, the strawberries glistened. I took the note from my pocket and tucked it under the doormat.

At the hospital, Auntie talked on her phone in the hallway, while the nurse with the mole changed Mom’s sheets. Niall and I were playing Go Fish with a pack of cards that another nurse, the nice one who worked at night, had given us. I never let Niall deal, because he always counted wrong.

“Go fish!”

I wasn’t paying attention. Niall kicked my leg. I drew a card. Jack of hearts.

No, of course the note wasn’t enough. That’s what Mom always said to Dad: you can stuff your sorry. What would she tell me to do? Go to church, ask Pastor Doyle for help? I didn’t trust him. He smiled too much, and all that incense burned my nostrils. Anyway, I knew what Pastor Doyle would say. To make amends, I should ask God for forgiveness. Instead, I decided to bring back more than I’d taken. 

“Got any sevens?” Niall asked.

I handed one over and counted my matching piles. I was five behind. When I forfeited, Niall acted like he’d just won World War Three.

“I did it! I beat you!”

The nurse finished tucking the sheets around Mom’s legs, scowled, and left.

***

They didn’t sell fresh fruit in the hospital, just candy bars, medicine bottles, and brownish roses. But there was this market we passed walking home, where they unloaded crates from trucks; cartfuls of green, orange, and yellow. I had pocket money saved up.

After school the next day, I brought Niall with me and even held his hand, because he went all bug-eyed around the vendors. They weren’t shouting because they were mad, I said, but Niall wouldn’t believe it.

“Mom sent Dad away because he shouted like that,” he said.

“No she didn’t.”

“Did too.”

Niall pretended he remembered the fights, but he was still a baby then. He never had to hide in the closet and lean against the mop, listening to them going at it.

We approached a man under an awning. His table had everything—cucumbers, bananas, apples, squash. A picture of Jesus had been taped to one of the tent-poles. Even with those sunbeams radiating from his head, Jesus looked so sad.

“Have any strawberries?” I held up a fistful of bills.

“You’re in luck. Last of the season.” He reached for the fruit. “Eat ‘em quick.”

We ran, Niall clutching one punnet, me the other two. Our faces blazed crimson. I could have run like that forever, unstoppable. I’d nearly done it, nearly righted things. Mom would wake up. Everything would go back to normal.

As we crossed the street, Niall tripped up the curb. The punnet tumbled from his hands and split. Loose berries rolled across the sidewalk, in all directions. I watched them roll, and roll, until they fell still. Then I began to shake. Not because I hated Niall, but because he was right. Maybe this was all my fault. 

“Don’t be such a stupid baby,” I shouted, as he peeled himself off the sidewalk. He licked one finger and smeared the blood from his skinned knees.

I made a pocket with the bottom of my shirt and recovered as many of the strawberries as I could. Most were dirty or smashed. We walked the rest of the way home. As we rounded the corner, I noticed new strawberries had begun to grow in the window box, small and green. Beside them, the others, the ones we hadn’t taken, had rotted. No one ever picked them.

I placed the spilled punnet on the doormat, plus one more.

“Here.” I pushed the third into Niall’s limp hands. “For Mom.”

That evening Niall laid the berries, beaming and fresh, at her bedside. The nice nurse picked gravel from his cuts and gave him special band-aids, with Tigger on them.

“We went to the market.” Niall hopped from one foot to the other, leaning over Mom’s sleeping face, like she was listening. “All by ourselves. We were brave. They had pineapples! Right Jamie?”

I didn’t answer. I was sick of him, sick of his questions and his bleeding knees and his hope. I wanted to grab handfuls of those strawberries and shovel them down. I wanted to eat and eat until my belly felt as sick as the rest of me.

***

A week later, while we were at school, one of the nurses called the Principal’s office. Mom had stirred, opened her eyes. We were dismissed early and Auntie pulled up, waving her hands, cigarette in her teeth. She tooted her horn and roared through a red light, but by the time we arrived, Mom was asleep again. 

“She loves you very much. Don’t forget that, sweetie.” Auntie pet my head like I was a cat, or some other small, soft, forgettable thing. I ducked away. Niall began to sob.

Then I noticed Mom’s bedside table—it was empty. The strawberries were gone. Hope spurted into my chest, and I tapped the nurse’s arm.

“Did she like them?”

“Like what, hon?” She searched my face until something beeped in the hallway, and she disappeared. 

On the way back to Auntie’s house, it rained. The car windows fogged up. I thought Niall would get worked up about tsunamis again, blabber on and on about walls of water 10 stories high, but he’d turned to the window. With his fingertip, he traced suns and stars and hearts into the murk. He wrote our names—his, mine, Mom’s. I imagined her awake, red juice around her lips, the sweetness finding those lost parts of her.

***

I paused outside the Nurses’ break room, down the hall, to see if the nice nurse would lend us another dollar for the vending machine. I poked my head in, but no one was there. In the trash can beside the door, a flash of color. I leaned over to get a better look. There were Mom’s strawberries, covered in white fuzz.

When I returned to Mom’s room, Niall was on the floor, shuffling cards. He couldn’t do it the proper way, with his thumbs, so he just scattered them, plopped down in the middle of the pile, and swirled them around with both hands. Cards passed over each other, under each other, all at random. It was a pretty good method. He was hyped up on Gatorade, covered in Cheeto dust, and a foot shorter than me. He still believed in Santa, and happy endings for good kids.

Mom’s chest rose and fell faintly. I kneeled, helped Niall gather up the cards, and handed him the deck.

“This time, you deal.”       

about the author

Lauren Cassani Davis is a writer and teacher based in New York City. She enjoys hummingbirds, fountain pens, and assigning short stories that will haunt her students for the rest of their lives. Her writing has appeared in No Contact, Monkeybicycle, and The Atlantic.

about the artist

DARKRECONSTRUCTION is an emerging nonbinary queer artist working in acrylic and watercolor paints, creating abstract expressionist paintings and murals. Their work focuses on the contrast between urban life and nature. They are inspired by concrete walls overgrown by ivy and tree branches, train underpasses covered in graffiti and grass, a strong New York summer rainstorm beating against their window, the decaying Red Hook warehouses, tiny alleys, and the way the air smells on the first few days of September. Their work carries an eco-brutalist approach to expressionism, a marriage between organic textures and urban visuals. More of their work can be seen on www.darkreconstructionart.com, @darkreconstruct on twitter, and @darkreconstruction on instagram.