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Mary knows the apartment across the hall is being rented to new tenants, that they are due to arrive tomorrow. She’s maybe a bit nervous, doesn’t miss the loud young couple that had lived there for the last six months and is hoping dearly that there is not a repeat of them. She is old now, tired and overworked and needing her sleep like she has never needed it before. She can’t focus when deprived of it anymore, can barely think.
She feels something like a stab of dread in the pit of her stomach the next day as she watches a young woman with her arms overloaded with boxes walk up the stairs, alone and unaided, through the peephole in her front door. The worry, though, is a temporary thing. It drops away the moment the woman puts her boxes down to fish her key from her pocket and Mary realises that she is pregnant, probably in her second trimester. The worry is rotated out for a brand new worry that makes her feel impossibly worse. This woman is more of a girl, maybe nineteen or twenty, and she is so alone. Mary keeps watch for a moment more, to see if anyone follows her up the stairs. Nothing. She sighs, turns her lock and, with a bright smile firmly in place on her face, she opens the door. It has been a long time since she was young herself, her own kids now adults who left her home decades ago. She did the whole thing with a husband by her side, with a supportive family, and still she holds onto most of that. She can’t imagine having done even a day of it by herself.
“Hello dear,” she announces, watching the young woman startle and tamping down the spark of guilt that ignites in her. It’s fine though, because the woman’s startled expression is one that quickly melts away into nothing, replaced by a slight smile. “I’m Mary, guess we’re going to be neighbours,” she holds out her hand and the young woman shakes it, a callous evident on the middle finger of her right hand.
“Sally,” she says and, as if by instinct, her hands move to her stomach.
“If you don’t mind my asking dear, how far along are you?”
“Four months,” Sally is still smiling, her face pretty and young, bright blue eyes shining genuinely, her hair long, dark, and slightly wavy. Mary resists the urge to ask her how old she is.
She nods instead. “Are you living alone?”
“I am,”
“Well, don’t be a stranger. Before he retired my husband used to be a chef. Come over for dinner later, okay?”
“Oh, you really don’t have to,”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We want to,”
Sally appears by their door at 6pm wearing a well-loved knitted jumper and the same jeans Mary saw her in that morning. She looks nervous, her hair a curtain around her face. Mary’s own days as a hairdresser have her fingers twitching, aching to fix it, to make it do her pretty face some justice. She is ushered in, introduced to Mary’s husband John, and sat at their table across from Mary. She keeps leaning her elbows on the table and then promptly pulling them back when she realises the posture she has assumed. Mary would like to tell her to relax but she knows it will be ineffective. She’s worried about Sally, concerned about her wellbeing and her baby and her solitude, so she is determined to keep a close watch, to make sure she’s okay. That she has people around her who can help her out.
It’s Mary who drives Sally to the hospital a few months later when she is in labour. She gets an out-of-breath call on her landline and rushes across the hall, seeing the inside of Sally Jackson’s apartment for the first time. It’s a sad, stark place, bereft of almost all furniture and almost entirely without decoration. There is a single mindmap blu-tacked to the wall, books piled on the floor and the tables, notebooks scattered everywhere, pens hazardously strewn across the floor. Half a glass of water sits on a loose leaf of paper with scrawl covering half of it, a ring of water smearing the ink. Mary keeps going, moving through the apartment. If Sally is not in this one kitchen/living/dining room then she must be in the empty office, the bedroom or the bathroom.
“Sally?” She calls as she walks into the bedroom, finding the young woman hunched over on a mattress that sits on the floor without a bedframe. She has no comforter, just a series of blankets, her pillows flat, sad things. Even from this angle, Mary can see her gritted teeth.
She manages to grunt out something like “here,” and Mary rushes to her aid, helps her up and into Mary’s retro car outside. The sky is bright blue and the air is warm. It is August, summer, and Mary decides that’s something she can talk about to try to distract Sally from the awful pain she’s in as they get stuck in traffic and Mary is so tempted to just floor it and hope nothing too bad happens because she just wants Sally to be okay. Sally Jackson is nineteen and about to be a little less alone in the world and Mary sincerely hopes that will be a good thing.
They get to the hospital eventually. Mary doesn’t follow her into the delivery room and feels her heart sink as the last thing she hears from Sally that day is “Gods, this will bankrupt me,” Mary stays in the waiting room. A man about her age who looks sincerely terrified keeps handing her coffee and creamer that is reminiscent of dishwater but still helps her keep awake.
“Your daughter?” He asks eventually. She’d imagine that’s who he is waiting for.
She shakes her head. “Neighbour,” she corrects, flattered that the man would so much as entertain the thought that she could have a daughter as young as Sally. He raises his eyebrow like he is hoping she’ll offer up more information. She doesn’t, too tightly wound to read social cues.
“Is the father in the delivery room with her?” Mary shakes her head. “That’s hard,” he says, and then he leaves to get more coffee. They are side by side for hours and at no point do they ask for each other’s names.
Eventually, the hours themselves blurred and distorted by the coffee and panic and the series of micro naps she has had, a nurse appears and ushers her over. “It’s a boy,” she says as she lets Mary into the room where Sally is laying, exhausted but smiling so brightly Mary’s eyes start to hurt underneath the fluorescent lights. She is cradling a baby to her chest, a tiny little thing who already has a rather impressive head of impossible black hair. The light bouncing off of it seems blue. Sally is mumbling to him, smiling and looking at her son like she can’t believe that he is real, that he is hers, that she finally, finally, is not alone in life. Mary knows what happened to Sally’s parents, understands that she’s probably shocked at the feeling of having a family again.
“What are you naming him?” Mary asks her.
“Perseus,” she says surely. Mary pretends not to find it odd. “Percy,” the nickname is something of a relief.
“That’s interesting dear,”
Sally blearily, tiredly nods. “One of the only Greek heroes to get a happy ending,” Mary’s husband walks to the hospital to pick them up because Mary knows she is in absolutely no place to drive, but not before he dotes over Percy, doesn’t shut up about his hair and, when he finally opens them, his eyes that are so startlingly bright they seem almost inhuman. They are sea green, not at all like Sally’s clear blue. Mary knows that baby’s features look nothing like they will when they grow up, but she also knows people like to insist baby’s have elements of their parents in their faces and their characters from their very first moments. Mary doesn’t see it. There is next to nothing of Sally in the shapes of her baby’s face.
They get back to the apartment block and John helps Sally up the stairs as Mary takes the sleeping baby in her arms. He snuggles into her shoulder, precious and perfect, She misses this. “I think I’ll be your grandmother,” she tells him, stroking the soft hair on his head.
They are standing outside of Sally’s apartment when John tells them to stop and wait, and Mary can’t help but smile to herself, knowing exactly what he is doing. He returns a moment later, holding a large box. Sally insists she can’t take it but he insists she must. It is full of lots of old baby stuff, clothes and toys, and some new supplements that John must have gone out to buy whilst Mary and Sally were at the hospital. She does truly adore that man.
Sally is embarrassed as they walk through her flat, and she and John refuse to accept the apologies that she really doesn’t need to offer them. There is nothing shameful about the apartment but it does make them both sad to see someone they are as fond of as Sally living in conditions like these. They walk Sally and Percy to the bedroom, the mattress occupying most of the floor, a cot sitting where one might expect a bedside table to be. Softly, Mary lowers him into it. He doesn’t even stir. She has a feeling he’s going to be an easy baby but a menace of a toddler. She can’t wait.
Every time Mary sees little baby Percy he is a little bigger, has a little bit more of a personality and a little bit less of his mother’s face. She takes care of the infant when Sally is working because she is retired and she has the time. Knowing Sally would never ask, she had offered.
She’s starting to suspect that he was named after a Greek hero because his dad is actually greek. His colouring is much darker than Sally’s, his skin bronze and his hair pitch dark. But she doesn’t know that for sure because Sally never talks about his dad. She doesn’t want to pry but Sally Jackson has this awful ability to worry her and she is never quite sure what she can do about it.
He wakes up from a nap in the cot that has been moved into her living room for the day and she looks up from her knitting as he babbles to himself. She taps her finger against his button nose and he does his absolute best to smile up at her even though his face isn’t quite ready for that movement yet. She picks him up and sits him on her lap to watch TV. He starts to chirp and giggle as fish swim across the scene, reaching his tiny hands out in front of him and grabbing at the air. She bounces her knees and wonders who his dad is, what he does or did, why he isn’t in the picture. She also kind of wonders how old he is, how well Sally knew him, if he knows Percy exists, a perfect baby that must surely be the spit of him because he is nothing like Sally at all. She’ll gather up the courage to ask Sally one day and, sadly, softly, she will tell Mary that he is lost at sea, nothing more.
She bakes Percy his first birthday cake. She isn’t a brilliant baker by any means, but she can make a decent Victoria sponge that will always be pretty wonky but will always taste damn good if she does say so herself, and she figures it’ll be just fine to stick a candle into. Sally brings Percy over wearing the cutest little baby grow with cartoon fish dancing across the soft, baby blue fabric. His hair is wild and dark and curlier than Sally’s, his face more his own than ever. Still no sign of Sally exists in the bright topaz glint of his eyes of the shape of his nose which is much less button these days. The three of them sing to Percy and he smiles, baby teeth small and white and somewhat pointed. They put on the TV in the background as they talk and he walks over to it, still babbling like he’s having a conversation with the TV. It’s some sort of nature documentary because Sally insists that they are Percy’s favourite for some reason.
Sally takes a sip of her water, smiling at Mary and explaining that she had done extra hours that week and had actually had enough spare change to get Percy a gift. “It’s nothing big,” she admits, “But he hardly minds,” She sets her water down and returns her hands to her lap. Fishes swim across the small TV screen in a gigantic whorling shoal and Percy starts clapping. Sally’s glass topples, spilling water onto Mary’s floor which she apologetically dives to clean up.
“I’m so clumsy,” she insists sorrily, but Mary is so certain that her hands were nowhere near the glass when it had fallen that she doesn’t understand why she is absorbing the fault that precisely nobody in the room is attempting to assign to her.
“Don’t be silly,” she says, lowering her aching knees to the hardwood floor to help with the clean-up even though it’s just water and she isn’t exactly very concerned about it. Percy continues to babble but the screen has changed to show seals lying dormant and huddled together on a beach.
Percy Jackson runs rampant around Mary’s living room, picking up his toys and presenting them to her proudly. He’s getting the hang of speaking a bit more so he will confidently announce each one to be what it is before he presses them into her hands. She claps encouragingly every time he does so. Sally had told her once, after putting him to bed, that she was worried about him, how he was developing. She had felt guilty about always leaving him with Mary and had decided to send him to day-care instead. He only went for one day before Sally started to insist that he would never go again without offering so much as a suggestion as to why. So Mary would encourage any positive sign of development she saw. She doesn’t get Sally’s worry, really, because Percy is a good kid, an entertaining one with a charming smile and a contagious giggle.
“Shark!” He decides, pointing at the pad of paper and cheap crayons on the table. She nods and hands it over, watching as he grips an ultramarine crayon in his tiny fist, roughly und uncoordinatedly pressing the wax to the paper, watching as it becomes flatter and flatter, more worn down. Of course it isn’t neat, but Percy likes to draw fish and every time he does she can decipher the intention in a way she never managed with her own children.
When he finishes he starts asking for juice and snacks and Mary kind of wonders how he still manages to be such a tiny toddler when he eats so much so voraciously. It probably has something to do with him moving at a million miles an hour constantly. He isn’t the type of kid that slows down. She gets the feeling that will develop into being a hyperactive little kid who doesn’t care quite enough for his own well-being.
There is a man now and suddenly Sally Jackon’s little apartment is as loud as Mary feared it would be almost five years ago when she first moved in. But it isn’t loud in the same way. It’s so much worse.
Sally Jackson is in her early twenties, her son four and so sweet and so funny and so personable. Increasingly, he’s gotten his head around words a little, and Mary loves to babysit him, listen to him talk about everything and anything. He has a hard time finishing thoughts, moving onto the next too quickly. She helps Sally in her pursuit to teach him to read but they aren’t having much success.
The man worries her. At first his presence is a transient one. He must be in his mid thirties and he is nice enough, polite enough. She bumps into him once as he is dropping Sally off and he offers a polite hello but he smells like beer and cigarette smoke. Mary holds out hope that she has caught him on an off day as he twitches his yellow-stained fingertips on Sally’s key, opening her door for her. And barely a month later he is moving in. There are a couple of weeks where things are normal, where she hears voices and laughter through the walls, hears the clatter as Gabriel’s furniture is brought up the stairs and into Sally’s apartment. Mary joins Sally over there to have coffee one day and finds the apartment still scarcely decorated but fully outfitted with smoke-stained furniture. Gabe is at work at the appliance store he is employed at and Percy is smiling as Sally sings to him and he tries his hardest to sing along and, for a while, Mary is just glad that Sally’s fortune seems to have changed so much.
And then the shouting starts. It’s an occasional thing at first, just an argument here and there. It makes Mary uncomfortable, sure, but she recognises that these young people are living together and are new to it and Sally has a mischievous toddler that she positively dotes on and Gabriel has a job he hates and there are bound to be tensions and disagreements. She realises, though, after a while, that part of why she feels so ill-at-ease when she hears the shouting is that it’s always a man’s voice, deep and booming and intimidating. She never even hears Sally Jackson, a bright spark with a sharp tongue and a brilliant wit, so much as try to defend herself.
Over time the shouting grows more frequent, more concerning. She hears clattering more often too. And Sally is increasingly too busy to come over for dinner or invite her over for drinks, and when she babysits, something which is also becoming more infrequent, he cries more, reacts strangely to doors closed too hard and couples arguing on the television. She expects it to end, waits for Gabriel to disappear, but he stays and stays and takes up so much more space than he deserves to in Sally Jackson’s tiny apartment. What had once been a scarcely utilised office space had become Percy’s bedroom over time but, as Mary observes when she comes over for tea for the first time in months and Percy marches her to his room to show her his drawings, there are bits of the room that seem to be set up for Gabe rather than Percy. She pretends not to notice it and smiles at the toddler. His drawings are getting better, still nothing except for sea creatures and the occasional horse. One of them has wings and Percy attempts to say something that she can assume is supposed to be ‘Pegasus’. She’s hardly surprised that the woman who named him Perseus is raising him on myths.
Gabriel doesn’t disappear and, instead, an invitation to a small wedding appears outside of her door. She attends even though she has decided by this point that she really doesn’t like the groom. She wears a nice dress she has had in her closet for a long time but scarcely finds the opportunity to wear, more adjusted to attending funerals than weddings these days. She spends the day looking after Percy, holding his soft hands in hers and absolutely gushing about how he looks in his tiny little suit, his hair still the same perpetual mess as always even though it is evident his mum has tried to tame it to minimal effect. His eyes seem to be growing brighter and brighter as he ages, and sometimes the way the sunlight, cool but bright on the chilly but pleasant autumn day, reflects off of his skin occasionally makes him look as though he has actually been carved out of bronze, a child made of semi-precious metal. She wonders sometimes how Sally feels about having a son who must look achingly like his long-dead father who he has never met. There are maybe twenty guests, Mary and John the only ones there for Sally aside from two women who introduce themselves as her co-workers. Gabriel’s guests seem to be a mixture of close family and poker buddies. His mother is the only woman on his side and there is something strange on her face as she watches the ceremony, something Mary can’t help but interpret as being relief.
Sally keeps the name Jackson. Mary doesn’t think she even considered taking Ugliano.
Mary usually lets the shouting be between Sally and Gabriel, always unsure what she can do about it. When it gets especially bad she calls over and hopes the ringtone can pierce the shouting, offers to take Percy for a bit. Sally always lets her and he always waits until his mother is gone to start crying. Invariably, Mary then takes him out for ice cream and fondly watches him smear the treat around his mouth, making jokes and telling stories the entire walk there until he manages to demonstrate a smile for her. She bends down and wipes his nose and doesn’t correct anyone who eagerly tells her what a darling her grandson is.
This time, though, there is a sound, a concerning smashing sound, and Mary, as fast as her aged knees can carry her, rushes across the hall to Sally’s front door. She still refuses to think of that apartment as Gabriel’s even though she knows almost all of the material belongings inside of it are his. She knocks on the door and Sally opens it only part way so Mary can’t quite see inside. She is wearing a checked apron with flour smeared on her cheeks. She insists that Percy just knocked a glass off the table and that nothing is amiss and it immediately puts Mary on edge because this isn’t how this normally goes, but she nods along anyway because the only reason she has to disbelieve Sally is a bad feeling in her gut. When Sally turns and closes the door, Mary catches sight of something glinting in her hair that looks like a tiny fractal of broken glass.
It is often Mary that drops Percy off at kindergarten, because Sally does not have a car and Gabriel needs his to get to the retail job that Mary is half sure he has almost entirely stopped going to. She is sure he is almost a fixture on that smoke-stained couch but she can’t know that for sure because she hasn’t been invited over to Sally’s in a long time.
He announces proudly that he picked his own outfit for today and dressed himself in it and nothing is even backwards, inside-out, or particularly mismatched. There is a clown fish screen printed on the long-sleeved t-shirt and a hole in the knee of his jeans that had formed when he tripped a few days ago, leaving the graze on the skin underneath evident. It is healing well, fading quickly. Mary’s days of grazed knees and elbows are long behind her but she seems to remember her own sons complaining for much longer than Percy does about how much they hurt, their skin red and ripped and angry at their clumsiness for much longer than Percy’s ever seems to be. She doesn’t think too much of it, but it is a little bit odd.
He hugs her tightly when she walks him to the outside of the kindergarten building, hugging her tightly around her middle. She realises, as he grips her as tightly as his tiny arms will allow him to, that he doesn’t want to let go, doesn’t want to have to leave her. Her stomach hurts as his teacher watches her ease him off. She’s a middle-aged woman with a friendly face and short, greying hair. Percy doesn’t seem to mind being handed over to her, linking his hands with hers, so she wonders if there is another teacher, or maybe the other children that are making him not want to leave.
When she picks him up he runs into her arms crying. She tries to comfort him enough that he might be able to explain what has happened to her but she has no such luck. She just holds his tiny body as it shakes in her arms and eventually the woman from earlier walks over, the rest of the class leaving with their parents or grandparents or babysitters or older siblings. “We have some concerns,” she says softly. “The reception has left a voicemail with his mother but it would give me some peace of mind to inform you now,” Mary nods. Sally has gotten increasingly less proficient at picking up her phone. She isn’t sure whether she even listens to her voicemails, almost certain they must always be steadily growing in number. She listens to the teacher as she cards her hair through Percy’s hair. It is soft and thick and wild as it always has been. “He has been claiming that there is a man following him, which is of course a report that we are taking very seriously, but he is also claiming that the man only has one eye in the centre of his face,”
Mary nods along even though her heart is in her throat. “Lots of his books at home are adapted versions of Greek myth,” she explains. Sally doesn’t actually have any books of myths, just seems to have a lot of them memorised and relays them to her son in more child-friendly forms. It is Mary that has those books because she knows they interest Percy and she is still determined to try to help him learn to read even though she is increasingly starting to suspect his difficulties with literacy might be caused by dyslexia. “He may have seen a man that scared him and projected one of those monsters onto him. I’ll tell Sally, but please take the claim seriously even if he is claiming it’s a monster,” the teacher nods and she takes Percy home and Sally’s eyes well up with tears when Mary tells her about the man with one eye. She seems positively terrified and when Mary hugs her, comforts her, she can’t help but notice a row of small, circular bruises on her arm.
It is a few weeks later when somebody else sees the man. Though he apparently has two eyes and a normal if off-putting face, Percy’s claim suddenly holds a lot more weight.
Sally shows up at her door sobbing one day, her makeup fully done but smeared and distorted by tears. She never used to wear makeup except for special occasions but it has become an everyday thing as of late. It’s one of those things that makes Mary’s stomach turn. She manages to choke out something that Mary is eventually able to interpret as Percy having been expelled from his school and, for a while, she is convinced she must have misinterpreted Sally’s words because how exactly does a seven-year-old get expelled? Sally is trying to figure out what to do and Mary is trying her best to help. Together, they find a new school that agrees to take him. They also start pursuing diagnosis because they both know about the ADHD and the dyslexia and they know the school system needs to understand that to give Percy a bit more of a chance.
Percy insists that Mary has to take him to the park one day and she agrees, always eager to spend time with the kid who is basically her grandson, to give him a break from all the banging and clattering and shouting that comes from his apartment but that both he and Sally seem to deny as if on instinct. She doesn’t see Gabriel anymore. He doesn’t go out during the day, doesn’t seem to go to work anymore, disappearing some nights then stumbling home in the early hours of the morning. Mary knows because he bangs his body about in the narrow hallways and she has trouble sleeping these days even though she is always dead tired. He has friends over often, a group of lumbering men who bring clinking bottles and cans of beer and don’t stop laughing and cheering until the early hours of the morning when they all but fall out of the building, spilling out onto the streets below.
Percy brings his new skateboard with them, putting it in the backseat for the drive. He runs to grab it as soon as she is parked, grabbing it and running straight to the smoothly paved paths to take it for short, clumsy sprints, She just sits and watches him, checking her purse for band-aids and antiseptic because she knows exactly what kind of kid Percy Jackson is. He falls a couple of times and gets straight back up. He’s a resilient little thing who is having too much fun with the skateboard to care about a few new bruises. He’s always covered in the things and she knows that they’re all easily explained away but it doesn’t give her very much peace of mind at all.
When she sees him next he has a sickly bruise on his orbital bone and she is already angry about it even though she has no idea how it happened. So, naturally, she asks.
Percy shrugs. “Fell,” he says, and the thing about Percy is that he is not necessarily the best liar, but he has this problem where he sounds like he is lying when he is being deathly honest and sometimes that feels like it might almost be the same thing.
John fights severe illness briefly and weakly and he fades away in a hospital room. She can’t stand the sight of all the tubes attached to him or the mechanical beeping or the constant intrusions of medical staff when all she wants is a last moment of normalcy where she can say goodbye like she’ll be seeing him again tomorrow. When the continuous squeal of the monitor signifies his heart stopping nurses and doctors come rushing in, ready to start their attempts to revive him that she can’t help but feel they must know won’t work. Pathetically, she tells them to stop so quietly she barely even hears her own words, and a young nurse walks out of the room crying. She wonders why she can’t do the same until she touches her own face and feels her fingertips come away damp.
She organises a modest funeral, one that she knows John would be happy with. His favourite songs play in the background and she doesn’t pretend he was a perfect being as she reads his eulogy. She cries as she laughs about the stupid and amazing things he did. “Jonathan McGraw,” she says, “Who should be remembered for who he was and not just who he has left behind,”
Sally and Percy attend, Percy wearing a black button-up and black trousers that are both at least one size too big, probably either second-hand or borrowed. She talks to the boy tearily as Sally goes up to the open casket holding a strange coin which she presses tenderly into John’s cold palm. “It’s a family tradition,” she explains, voice thick, “It’d make me feel better if he were to be buried with it,” so, of course, he is. Gabriel isn’t there with them but, then again, he hadn’t been invited.
She goes home to her apartment and her family joins her even though it is a modest space not intended to accommodate company of this magnitude. Sally and Percy sit with them, Percy taking a seat on the floor and pulling his knees up to his chest. He sits and fidgets and chews on his lower lip. She wants to know what he is thinking but she is too stricken with her own grief to ask. Sally and Percy are the last to leave that night and she gets the distinct sense that they don’t want to go home as much as they don’t want her to be alone. She almost wants to throw herself to Sally Jackson’s feet and beg her for an explanation, for the truth, beg her to get out, but mourning has made her numb and her bones are fragile and bird-like. She is old and there is only so much she can do for the Jacksons.
Percy goes to a boarding school after being expelled again. “I don’t want him to go,” Sally sobs over the phone. Mary can practically hear the way her hands shake. She can also hear Gabrie and his buddies laughing in the background, sometimes catching the tail end of a comment she can’t help but assume is being made against Percy. “But what other choice do I have?” He is onto his third school. There aren’t many that will take him anymore and almost all of those that will are boarding schools for troubled children. It’s not a label she can quite reconcile with Percy Jackson who is so perfectly behaved at home, if impulsive and reckless. Part of her wants to reassure Sally that at least he will be away from Gabriel but she has never quite been sure if what she believes is happening is actually happening or if she is simply catastrophizing, assuming the worst.
He leaves for his boarding school and suddenly she needs not babysit, needs not rescue him from shouting and clanging, needs not drive him to school and to the park and clean his wounds. Suddenly she is alone and reminded awfully of Sally Jackson’s early days in her apartment, where she knew next to nobody, where she was isolated within her walls. She has family, of course, but they live in other parts of the country and she doesn’t expect them to come to comfort her all hours of the day. She also can’t bring herself to abandon her city after spending her entire life there, so he stays alone in her apartment. She doesn’t think about it as she does it, but she finds herself watching nature documentaries as she sits on her sofa and knits sea-green blankets and child-sized dark blue jumpers.
Summer ends and autumn fades in, replaced in a moment by winter with an angry clash of thunder. She hears talking in the halls and rain outside and she moves to her front door to look through the peephole. Sally and Percy are walking outside, lugging a suitcase in the direction of their apartment. She pushes her door open to get their attention then rushes back into her apartment and gathers cool-coloured knitwear in her arms. She hands it all to Percy then hugs him. He returns the gesture and laughs into her shoulder.
She spends Christmas with the Jacksons. They get takeout and she pretends not to mind that Gabriel has joined them. He complains about the food and the décor and the temperature of the room and the company he is in. He leaves every ten minutes to smoke on her fire escape and after a white he starts stumbling back in, increasingly lumbering and uncoordinated, so he suspects there is a flask or two hidden somewhere on his person that he has been taking swigs from. He always smells like smoke and alcohol so the strong scent on his breath isn’t really suspicious in and of itself.
Percy keeps looking at her Christmas tree. It is small and fake and somewhat sparsely decorated but he still seems enamoured with it. She wonders if he has ever actually had one. She normally spends her Christmases with John’s family who still live in New York, but John is gone now and she can’t bring herself to turn up to his older sister’s house without him.
The holidays end and Percy goes back to boarding school and the cycle continues. He comes back for a few weeks then leaves then comes back for the summer with the knowledge that he is not welcome to return and Sally will desperately have to go searching for another option. He seems sadder and angrier every time Mary sees him and that is becoming rarer and rarer.
He is still a child, still slight and tiny, but he is also evidently a child who does not want to spend his time at home anymore. He leaves with his skateboard and she watches him pass along the streets quickly and nimbly until he is too far away for her to see him through her window. She likes to sit by her window and read or knit or journal for much of her days now, but she rarely actually sees him return. By nine in the evening she always seems to have dozed off and she wakes up, as if by clockwork, at midnight, her back aching, to transfer herself from the armchair to her bed. Sometimes she wonders if Percy is back yet when she wakes up and watches an unsleeping city lit by street lights and neon sides through her window. One day she actually sees him as he returns, carrying his board which has broken in half, looking sullen. When she goes grocery shopping next she allows herself something of a detour and implores a young woman working at a skate shop to help her choose a replacement. She is intimidated by the setting and the woman with the pink hair and face punched full of silver metal, and she has next to no idea how much a skateboard costs or what it is she is buying, but the employee is helpful and she has the money and she really can’t stand the thought that Percy might be trapped inside all day, just in case she’s right about what is happening in that apartment across the hall.
He is ecstatic when she gives the gift to him, but also sincerely apologetic. “I can’t take this,” he insists, his mother’s manners and mannerisms so much a part of him even if, as he ages, he somehow manages to look less and less like her.
“You can,” she returns, “I want you to,” so, hesitantly and reverently, he does.
Percy Jackson is twelve and Sally Jackson is thirty two and they have gone missing whilst Gabriel Ugliano who has only gotten worse, gotten more brazen, is perfectly fine at the home that is not his and never has been. There is only a conspicuous absence in Mary’s chest where her heart should be. No. This is wrong. So, so wrong.
She tells the police as much, insists that Sally Jackson is a good mother and Percy Jackson is a good son and Gabriel Ugliano is a chain-smoking drunk who shouts and must throw things because of all the terrible noise he makes. But she is an old woman, a lonely old crone whose husband is long dead and whose family calls but doesn’t visit, who might be losing her mind and would have nobody in the world to tell her as much. And Gabriel Ugliano is in a managerial position, has managed to hold down a job for a long time even though he seldom shows up, has family and friends and a delinquent stepson with an academic record that shocks everyone who hears it, who has bruised knuckles in almost every recent photo of him that exists and has had anger issues for half a decade. It is Gabriel Ugliano who goes on the news and incites a manhunt for a child who Mary refuses to believe is anything but perfectly innocent.
A bus blows up. The name Perseus Jackson is affixed to it and Mary doesn’t accept it, refutes it to anyone who will listen. And then comes the destruction of the St. Luis arch and she watches the video forensically every time it plays on the news because she can see Percy, a small spot of bright orange and impossible ebony black, falling helplessly and horribly into the water which is so far from the monument she cannot believe it doesn’t end with him eviscerated upon the ground. The more effort she puts into ripping the video apart, the more dizzying she finds it. She becomes unable to focus on the surface of the water properly. They insist it is his fault and she wonders how they could possibly think that when he is clearly just a desperate child trying to save his life. She knows they don’t find his body but that doesn’t mean he has made it out. There are no mentions of Sally Jackson since her initial disappearance.
She wonders if Percy Jackson is still alive, how he is going to live with the awful ghosts of his life if he is. His upbringing has not been an easy one and now he is the subject of a manhunt. She can’t even imagine being in his position.
The media cycle around the Jackson’s feels incessant, never-ending, until one day it ends and Percy is cleared and still nobody mentions Sally because she is not nearly as interesting as her troubled son to the general public. Mary feels her absence though. Has for the entire time. They return home and she forces her way into their apartment even if she is not invited in and Gabriel is still there, waiting ominously in the corner with a lit cigarette and a near-empty beer bottle. He feels no relief at their safe return but Mary’s enthusiasm will make up for his lack of it. It must.
It is Gabriel who goes missing next. It is not a story anybody is concerned with, Mary least of all. She takes up his space in their apartment, looks at the walls with a vague sense of horror because of how they are stained. She can imagine beer bottles and whisky bottles thrown against them, almost empty but not quite. Sally Jackson stops wearing makeup every day. She is in her early thirties and starting to go grey and Mary just wants to mother her. It is blatant that she doesn’t feel too strongly about her husband’s absence. Percy suddenly seems a lot less accident prone too, and she wonders whether or not she can forgive herself because really, she knew what was happening in the apartment across the hall but could never convince herself to step in in any sort of permanent capacity.
Gabriel never returns and eventually, after selling a statue of him, Sally and Percy leave too. She continues to call them as often as she can, visits their new apartment when she has the energy and revels in the knowledge that none of their furniture is his, none of it smells like smoke and beer and something more acrid. The apartment smells, instead, like sea salt and fresh air and Sally Jackson’s baking. She knows she will not last much longer, that her body is not meant to keep sustaining her for long.
Pancreatic cancer. She accepts the diagnosis, accepts what it will do to her. She talks to Sally Jackson every day and Percy will almost always jump into the conversation too. Mary is in no state to visit anymore, but this is almost as good. Sally shows up with cookies and a strange coin one day. She doesn’t explain why she is giving it to Mary when she passes it over but it is understood. Mary tells her eldest to make sure she is buried with it.
She is a Christian woman. The afterlife is not the Christian one she had been expecting. She ends up in a good place anyway, Elysium they call it. She thinks about Sally Jackson, about how much of a field day she would have if she were to find out that her myths had been right all along.
The thing about this Elysium is that it seems to be occupied in such startling capacity by dead kids. A teenage girl is the first person she has a real conversation with. She is a slight thing with such innocence in her dark, droopy doe eyes. She speaks with an Italian accent. She doesn’t last long, says that she is ready to do it again, to try to live a life in full. She says goodbye and tries to remind herself that the girl is gone not because she has died but because she is alive again and there is no space for grief to exist in that.
She keeps talking to the dead children, keeps talking to the dead adults too. She has no sense of time in her afterlife, can never really be sure how long has passed outside, but she has a feeling that the teenagers are rushing into her sector of the afterlife at a much faster pace than usual. Most of them pass through, say that they’d prefer to have another go at it than stay with her, but she is old and weary and she has done enough. She doesn’t ask anyone else why they are there and they do not ask her. Honestly, she doesn’t know how it is that she ended up here instead of in the Fields of Asphodel amongst the great majority of everyday people. She is, afterall, just another everyday person.
Another wave of deaths. Another wave of departures. She sees the Isle of the Blest which they are hoping for and has lived with the fullness that they are chasing. She does nothing to discourage them but these are no things which she needs for herself.
There is one boy, though, who sticks around. “I can’t do that again,” he says softly. He has incredible eyes, an electric blue that are nothing like Percy Jackson’s but still somehow make her unable to forget their tumultuous insistence. He smiles sadly at her, a scar on his lip distorting. He actually asks.
“I don’t know,” she admits honestly. “I gave to charity,” I supposed, “Supported this young mother--Sally-” she means to continue but the boy smiles widely and she can’t understand why.
“Jackson?” She nods and he laughs and explains everything and suddenly the world makes so much more and so much less sense.