We are excited to share Jason JS Barton’s short story, “Maury’s Lake”. This piece was the Runner-Up Prize Winner of the 2024 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction.
Judge Jackie Ess had this to say about the short story:
The first runner-up, Maury’s Lake, by Jason Barton, takes us from the beginning of life to its end, exploring dementia, we seem to be in a swirl of families and places and having to step up. A silence seems to be opening, always threatening to break through.
Maury’s Lake
Jason JS Barton
It’s a quarter to eight at night and it’s still hot. The midwest in summer is hell. Georgina’s clacking around in the kitchen in her high heels – I don’t know how any woman can cook with those things on. I don’t know how anyone can cook period in this muggy heat. It’s her one superpower, cooking without sweating.
Georgina’s parked Ben with me on the verandah while I work. Last month I walled it off with plastic chicken wire so he can’t fall off the deck, because it is impossible for me to watch him a hundred percent of the time and do the things I have to do to keep this family afloat. Not that he can manage much yet, just a step or two before flopping onto his diapered bum. Still, it’s amazing how fast he can crawl. I’ll be sitting here marking papers and in a blinking second he’ll scoot over, grab my belt with those tiny fists and bury his big silly grin in my sweater or T-shirt or whatever I’m wearing. He’s got teeth now too. I don’t know why he likes to do it. It’s weird and funny and gross and I enjoy the look on Georgina’s face when she sees the huge slobber spot on my shirt. I think it would drive anyone who irons creases into their jeans crazy.
Ben’s eating paint flakes in the corner when the screen door behind my head opens and the clacking heels march to a stop by my ear and Georgina says:
“Jay, your mother’s on the phone.”
I didn’t hear any ringing.
“Now?” I say.
“No, it was last week but I just thought I’d mention it today.”
I ignore the comment. “She’s phoning from Edmonton at this hour?”
“She’s not in Edmonton,” Georgina says. “She’s at the airport.”
“Our airport? Christ.”
I start to get up. Georgina walks in front of me to pick up Ben.
“Too late. She’s taken a taxi.”
She returns to the kitchen and the screen door slams shut.
About thirty minutes later a Bluebird cab pulls up. Georgina’s inside the house feeding Ben so it’s just me to witness the grand entrance. My mother’s in the front seat beside the driver, holding onto the Jesus strap as she always does. Probably telling him where to turn and where he should slow down. I wonder what she’s going to look like this time. She changes every time I see her. White hair, blue hair, more weight, less weight. New shoes. Always a little older, the one constant. I know she thinks I don’t see her often enough. I suppose the changes prove it.
The driver heaves her suitcases onto the sidewalk and then heaves them back in the trunk when she tells him to take them to the Howard Johnson downtown. Downtown. Really. You’d think this was New York.
Once I would have told her that she could stay with us, but nowadays I’m not about to say anything. Maybe because I know what she’ll reply, maybe because I don’t want to. The cab departs in a rooster-tail of dust and my mother ambles to our steps with the sideways roll that comes from being fat with a bad hip. She’s carrying her purse and a boat-sized shopping bag full of what I know will be baked goods from Doris’ place.
“Hi Ma,” I say.
She looks around the verandah, at the papers at my feet, at the beanbag chair I’m sitting on.
“Nice office,” she says.
“Enjoy your trip?”
“Plane goes up, plane comes down. That’s good enough for me.”
“How’s dad?”
She looks at me. “I would have called, but what’s to tell? He’s back in hospital for a few days, the doctors are adjusting his drugs. Nothing serious, they said. But they would, wouldn’t they? Anyway, I thought I’d come visit.”
“Surprise.”
My mother coughs. She looks tired. Edmonton’s not that far but the connection through Chicago makes it a long trip.
The screen door creaks and Georgina stands silhouetted against the cool dark of the house, squinting into the evening sun. She carries Ben in the crook of her left elbow, his pea-stained bib still attached.
“Say hello to Grandma,” Georgina says. She props his hand in a little wave.
My mother smiles. “Vegetables already? I’m impressed! Your father, now, he wouldn’t take a bean from God’s own hand at your age.” She puts down her shopping bag of food and takes Ben from Georgina. “Such a big boy! And so heavy, you eating rocks?”
Georgina smiles and invites my mother inside. I catch her eye as they pass through the door while I’m tidying up my papers and wrapping things up on the verandah. I want a moment to tell her that my mother’s not staying but the chance doesn’t come. She’ll figure it out from the lack of luggage. Whatever else, Georgina’s not stupid.
Ben drinks milk from his bottle while we eat dinner. Chicken, beans and fried rice, sort of pretend Mexican. Later Ben plays on the living room floor while we watch television, and when the news is over we watch him instead. My mother tells us how much Ben is like me when I was a baby, only brighter. She’s discovering the things that Ben has learned to do since she last saw him. Ben pushes his truck around the carpet. He stacks a couple of blocks. He flips the pages of a doggie board book, makes car noises with his mouth. When I sit on the floor and juggle his wooden blocks, he grabs two, waves his arms up and down, then lets go, tumbling the blocks into the air. My mother laughs. After an hour or so Ben bursts into cranky wails. Georgina takes him to the bathroom to change his diaper and ready him for bed and the living room expands with the silence. My mother dozes in her armchair.
“Tired, Ma?”
“Me? Why? Is there a rule against watching people with your eyes closed?”
“So just say you’re tired.”
“Well who wouldn’t be? It’s such a long way, you choose to live out in the middle of nowhere.”
“That’s rich, coming from Edmonton.”
I rummage in the desk drawer for a forgotten pack of cigarettes. My mother’s eyes narrow as they follow the small flame that flickers from the match to my mouth.
“Since when do you smoke?”
“I just started.”
“Funny man.”
“You can stay, you know,” I say.
“What, and impose? I’d rather die.”
Georgina appears in the shadows of the hallway. “I’ve made the bed in the study,” she says to my mother. “In case you change your mind.”
“You’re a sweet girl.” My mother shakes her head. “But I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Georgina disappears again, this time into the kitchen, and reappears in a few minutes with coffee and a tray of the pastries that my mother carted from home. They aren’t bad but they’re hard and there’s a tinge of staleness. My family always bought yesterday’s baking at reduced prices. You get used to it.
“I asked Sam to look in on him while I’m here,” my mother is saying as we eat, “He agreed though he’ll complain afterwards, of course, he always does, you’d think we’d asked him to donate his liver. Not that there’s much of that left after all the years of drinking. Leonard got married to that Swedish woman, did Sam send you a card? I thought he and Doris might have told you, seeing as you married Georgina.”
“Good for Leonard,” I say. “Imagine, someone in the family with guts.”
“Guts Leonard has. Brains, we’re still seeing. It would break Bessie’s heart if she knew. It’s God’s mercy she’s stone deaf and blind, even Doris admits that. You remember Leonard, Georgina?”
My mother turns with effort in her chair. Georgina’s sitting in a dim corner of the room, curled in the antique wooden rocker my brother sent when Ben was born. On the side-table is a book that she’d stopped reading last year, and over her knees is a quilt we bought at an Amish farm. She’s checking a text message on her phone. Work, I’m guessing, from the frown on her face. She runs her right forefinger and thumb along her eyebrows until they meet above her nose in a pinch.
I’m not sure why she would remember any of the family. It’s not like any of them came to the wedding when I married out of the tribe.
“Leonard,” she says, “bald guy, accountant, lived a couple of years in Montréal?”
I give her the thumbs up. Wow. Another superpower.
My mother nods her approval. “Cast of thousands but you’ve got it down. Smart girl. How’s work?”
“Okay. Keeps me busy,” Georgina says. “How’s Jay’s father?”
“He’s back in hospital. I was telling Jay on the verandah. Well, what can you expect? Most days no one’s at home and the lights are out. He just stares. I might as well be a bug on the wall.”
“That must be hard.”
Georgina’s good at empathy. Woman should have been a psychiatrist. My mother nods, and I nod too.
“You managing okay?” I ask my mother.
I know that my brother hired a nursing aide, but even so the burden of care for an old demented man with bad balance and no bladder control must be heavy.
“Managing. What’s managing? I get by,” she says. “Such strong coffee, Georgina, you like it like this?”
“I work in the evenings, Ma,” I say. “We both do. It helps me stay awake.”
“Really? The money I would give for a good night’s rest. It’s hard with your father wandering at night. All around the house, room to room. I have to keep the cupboards locked and everything closed, or God knows what he’d get into. So who can sleep? What he’s looking for, I can’t imagine.”
That would be just like my father, I think. Haunting the house before he’s dead.
“Who’d think he’d be so restless in his own house. We got some tranquilizers from the drugstore, but the price…”
“Sedatives.”
“What?”
“Sedatives. Tranquilizers are for horses. Besides, I thought you didn’t want more drugs.”
“Well, what’s one more when you’ve bought the whole pharmacy? We don’t use them much now anyway. Maybe we should try tranquilizers.”
Georgina’s rocker creaks slightly. She adjusts her quilt, picks up the forgotten book. “What does he do during the day?”
My mother shrugs. “Little of this, little of that. Not so different from me or you.”
I’m not sure what she means.
“He can’t read newspapers. And he falls flat on his face if he stands too quickly. If he make it to the mailbox with the walker the nurse throws a party. That’s what it’s come to.”
”So not much.”
My mother shrugs. “He eats, listens to the radio. Well, for all I can tell he’s listening. And movies.”
“Television?” Georgina asks.
“No. He’s got no mind for following stories anymore. Not that my attention’s so good either. I meant movies from our vacations. It’s curious, they seem to calm him.” My mother puts her plate down on the table. “You’ve never seen them, have you? No, I didn’t think that Jay would show you them. Leonard found the old reels in the basement, under some crates of Jay and Ruthie’s old books and magazines.”
“Vacations? What vacations?”
My mother’s got me here. I have a single traumatic memory of a road trip to the Grand Canyon. My brother and I had laid bets on when the fighting would start. Neither of us had guessed that the correct answer was the driveway. But my mother’s using the plural. What other vacation was there?
“You forget!” She accuses me. “Those trips to Maury’s place in the summer? Why your father ever bothered I wonder?”
“Maury’s place?” I frown. My mother is right, I had forgotten. My father’s brother had owned a lakeside cottage. Well, in truth it was just a shack tacked to the edge of a swamp that bred giant mutant blackflies. Maury had found it a half-mile down a dirt road from a mobile home colony. The colony had deemed the land unfit for building and sold it as yet another cut-rate bargain that my family had scooped up. Apparently we were not miserable enough on our first visit because we made the pilgrimage several summers in a row, until Leonard caught some sort of infection from the water.
Home movies. A Kodak super-eight that was one of the many electric gadgets my father loved to tinker with. This one had the bonus feature of producing material to bore the relatives stone-cold dead at Christmas and New Year’s.
“Sam showed me how to work the projector,” my mother says. “It was Doris’ idea. For all that, she’s not as stupid as everyone says.”
“Does he recognize his family in them?” Georgina asks.
“Well who knows. Who knows what he sees and remembers. Besides, I’m not sure I recognize myself in those pictures, they’re so old and blurry. But at least they keep him quiet. These days it’s enough. We’re not asking rocket science from your father anymore.”
We stop talking. I suppose this is the point where I should bring up the issue of nursing homes again. It’s not as if it hasn’t been thrashed out many times before by me and my brother and my sister Ruthie, and given up as hopeless against my mother’s stubborn refusals. Shameful to even think such a thing. Your own father. I have heard those words before and I don’t need to hear them again.
I do not know what my mother thinks she owes him, that she should spend her last years mopping the floor of his excretions and decorating the house with large felt-pen signs that say TODAY IS WEDNESDAY and THE MONTH IS JANUARY, which he probably doesn’t read anyway and which if he did would mean as much to him as the rain in Spain, maybe less since he was such a fanatic about the weather.
“So.” My mother coughs.
Georgina puts down her book. Ben gives a short cry in his sleep, which is muffled by the walls. We pause our breath to see if he continues.
“He’s a good boy,” my mother says. “Should be toilet training soon. Jay, call me a cab, I’m tired.”
Georgina offers her the study again, which my mother declines, saying that her pills are in her bags and she has to stay healthy because God knows who would look after my father if she got sick. We don’t call the taxi. I drive her to the Howard Johnson, which is only ten minutes on the other side of the train tracks once you get on the highway. There’s a Bluebird cab there when we arrive but it’s not the same driver.
“Good night, Jay,” my mother says.
“I’ll pick you up in the morning,” I say as she walks away.
“Stop smoking,” she says.
I watch her lurch through the glass door of the reception, rolling from side to side, her balance skewed by the huge black purse in her left hand.
The drive home is uneventful. I park the Subaru on the gravel and trudge up the wooden steps to the verandah. I clear a space among Ben’s toys and sit on the top step, press my shoes against the chicken wire. The house is silent. Ben’s asleep and probably Georgina too. I don’t feel like going in just yet. Truth is, I’m not sure what I feel like at all.
I light a cigarette. One last one.
Alone outdoors at night. The day’s heat has dissolved but the air still feels muggy, lying like a damp velvet darkness on the skin. It was Georgina who found this tiny clapboard cottage, when we moved to this ridiculous nowhere college town. The house is old and creaks, it needs a new roof, and the heating bills in winter are insane, but there’s a good view across the valley, across the green fields of nothingness. At midnight the sky is ink-black, lit only by stars and a few fireflies, now and then a pair of headlights cresting a far-off hill. It’s lonely and it’s empty. Just what you’d expect of a house in the middle of nothing.
I wonder how many years I will live here. Wonder how many years I will have with Georgina, how many years with Ben.
Time to stub out the cigarette. The taste is awful, I don’t know why anyone smokes these things.
I set up camp in the study, where my mother would have slept if she’d stayed. I spread out the pile of papers I brought in from the verandah, get myself some more coffee, put out a plate with a couple of my mother’s pastries. I try to work but my mind is too unsettled.
What does my mother want? One thing for certain, it’s not what I want. It’s not what I can give. I close my eyes and I see our house in Edmonton, the yard we played in, the neighbor’s house on the edge of the wheatfields, and beyond that the long yellow-brown ridge of foothills that stretched to the horizon and the start of the Rocky Mountains. Those foothills are what my father saw when he arrived on a train as a twenty-year-old and what I saw from the plane when I left thirty years later.
I don’t want to think of my father as a man who can’t remember my name. A man who gets lost between the bedroom and the kitchen, who wears diapers awake and to bed because eating and shitting and pissing have become irrelevant to him. It’s not his life anymore. It’s my mother’s.
I don’t think I could do it. All that caring takes equal parts courage and fear and guilt. Would my mother cry if she heard me say that? I’m not hard. I don’t hate my father, I’m just not sure that I know who he is. Anymore. Not now or then. Family’s complicated.
I sit on the bed and turn on the television. My mother would like this room. Georgina has decorated it with pictures of my brother and my sister and their families, and photographs of her own blond-haired Latvian relatives. Our wedding picture is somewhere in the corner. My mother always claimed that she was a people person. What that means is open to interpretation.
The weather channel says that tomorrow will bring a mix of sun and rain. Relief, finally. In Edmonton there is already a slim absurd chance of snow. The screen scrolls through a list of cities and towns with their high and low temperatures from the day to come, and when it reaches the far north the screen goes blank, pauses, then begins all over again.
It is the start of a new day and I need to go to sleep. I turn down the covers of the bed and crawl between the sheets. Papers be damned.
I don’t remember much of the Grand Canyon. I am not even sure if the little I do recall is from the trip or from the photographs we took to abuse the relatives. But it’s not the Grand Canyon my mind conjures up as I start to drowse, but long-buried images of the black swamp we called Maury’s lake.
My mind is playing a short clip from one of those dreaded movies. I do not know who is operating the camera. It could be Maury or it could be my mother, it’s not my father because there he is, my father as a young man, horsing around with my older brother under the sprinkler that’s watering Maury’s yellow weeds. There are shots of the lake, where Leonard and I are playing in the ooze of mud with a bucket and some rusting tools. Not everything is clear: the focus is bad and my memory dim.
The camera cuts to my father, which must be some time later because he’s dry again and lying on the lawn reading a book. He laughs and waves the operator away, waves us away, those who would be seeing or remembering this decades later, including his future self. My sister Ruthie, who is not yet two, I think, when this is taken, is just visible in the corner of the screen.
And this is the curious part. Ruthie is absorbed with some plastic toy, ignoring the camera and my father, when suddenly, unwatched, she pivots, crawls to my father in a second, grabs his belt with her two tiny fists, and buries her face in the checked shirt that he is wearing. And when she emerges with this big slobbery grin that is captured by the camera in close-up, you can see, in the background to the ringlets of her hair, the spreading wet stain on the belly of the laughing man that was my father.
Jason JS Barton’s Bio:
“By day I am a neurologist and a neuroscientist who researches how the human brain manufactures vision, and how this goes wrong in my patients. I have written stories most of my life but these have lived mainly in a drawer, now an electronic folder on my laptop. ‘Maury’s Lake’ is one that has been with me for many years, and its setting is derived from a year I spent living in Iowa.”