Glomerular Filtration
By Haleigh Yaspan
2.
When Maeve was born, writhing and yawning, Conrad curled his fingers around her wrist and thought my God so full of life, awed. His grandfather, Conrad Sr., had died in an adjacent wing of the same hospital some forty years earlier. His grandmother declined to return. Conrad did not perceive this as a loss.
He watched Marianne clutch her baby to her chest, aflame with fidelity. She was life incarnate. He was scared to touch her, scared to let anyone else touch her. Thinking he might extinguish her by mistake. Thinking the house on Wright Street too small for the original three inhabitants, let alone four, let alone five—the family unit too big and imposing and heavy for the baby’s small, unpracticed lungs. Even as an only child, Conrad had absorbed certain lessons of providence.
A bespectacled nurse told the room that Maeve—then unnamed—was stunned from the C-section, but healthy, and that a more rambunctious disposition could be expected after a few days, but no one would hear of it. They thought they had the perfect baby, placid and ready to learn. Conrad’s father held two fingers over the baby’s heart, no bigger than a walnut, and sighed heavily.
Conrad shifted where he stood. His father was visibly unwell. His health had declined markedly in the past year. Illness was forcing him to inhabit his body in a way he seemed to find uncomfortable. His walk had devolved to a reluctant, awkward shuffle; he dragged his swollen ankles unconvincingly.
Conrad Jr. had been a commanding, athletic child. When he was born, his father was a twenty-five-year-old pastor. Conrad Sr. and Arletta were living in her parents’ basement when the first baby came, and not long after he looked into his young wife’s eyes and promised her that they would have a house with a nursery, with faux finishing on the kitchen walls and embroidered drapes in the master bedroom, before the baby’s first birthday.
He more or less kept his word. The burnt-orange three-bedroom on Carlisle Avenue was the only home Rex had ever known. For him, it was inscribed with the trauma of an adolescence marked by physical fragility, the ephemeral and indelible mark left by an ill-timed influenza epidemic which his father had expected would end his life not one year after it began. As a boy, Rex patched himself over with idolatry of the nearest possible target, until such time when his enduring guardian, enduring no longer, saw fit to disappear, and he could have sworn he grew three inches overnight.
On Carlisle Avenue, Rex’s brother had been the savior. His father procured the home from a churchgoing octogenarian with plans to retire to an assisted living facility closer to the coast. A wizened smile flickered over her face as she recalled time spent with her husband before he was her husband. She threaded the beads of her rosary between her fingers.
“Arthritis?” Conrad Sr. asked with great sympathy.
She made him promise not to sell the house to anyone outside of the church. He nodded indulgently, rustling curly tufts of jet-black hair around his temples, and smiled back at her, thinking of the son who bore his name.
On Wright Street, Conrad Jr. lived with his blend of fantasy and matter, straying in deed and doctrine. Conrad knew his wife made no appeal to sympathy. His childhood home was the entirety of Rex’s life. A threat to his grasp on it would be addressed accordingly.
As a recently wed twenty-three-year-old, Marianne had smoked sullenly in her in-laws’ backyard, perched insouciantly upon a picnic table that had fallen into disuse. Her hair was auburn, sun-lightened, pulled back chaotically. Her new husband had surprised her. She toyed absently with the hem of her faded pink tunic, swinging her legs against the underside of the table in muted puerility.
“Honestly, my heart broke the first time I saw him in court. He was such a sweet boy. But he was vicious that day. I didn’t know he had it in him.”
Marianne cocked her head but said nothing.
“You think I’m foolish?” he asked, smiling faintly.
“Not foolish, I don’t think. Optimistic, maybe.”
“Generous of you.” Conrad took a long, final drag off the cigarette before snuffing it on a damp section of the bench not six inches from his thigh. He moved to a slow, perfunctory cadence. Marianne eyed him critically.
“I suppose I could have said worse,” she murmured, shrugging.
“You’d like my heart to break again?”
3.
When his parents-in-law threw a party for Maeve’s first birthday, Conrad said She never let me change a diaper, not once and Linda and Patrick Cameron thought okay, very good, our Christian daughter. Marianne bristled and squirmed away.
The first time he woke up to the crying baby he left his bed, left Marianne, and held Maeve to his chest. He didn’t know whether he was supposed to feed her or how. He didn’t know if this much crying was normal or if she was in pain. He checked her diaper but his night vision was imperfect and so he put the baby back in the crib to turn on the light, afraid to hold her with anything other than his full attention, and seconds after the light was on Marianne was in the doorway.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought I might need to change her.”
“I’ll do it. Go back to sleep.”
Sixteen years later, Maeve drove herself to the nearest clinic for the first time to be checked for albuminuria and hypertension. Marianne clutched a mug of chai tea tightly as she watched her only child reverse out of the driveway. Maeve had grown accustomed to having her blood drawn, a staple outing of her childhood. She was comfortable with the clinic’s routine and the turnover of technicians. But it made her think of a body as parts in an uncomfortable way—nothing solid and whole, just blood and constituent organs—and that made her stomach flip.
Maeve knew that everyone died because all life was lent in the first place—
“More water,” the technician muttered as she dragged two fingers down Maeve’s left forearm.
“I’m sorry?”
“Drink more water. To help find a vein. Ah. There we are.”
The lab results did not come back to her quickly. Maeve knew that was a good thing. An immediate follow-up call from the doctor’s office was never a good sign.
Marianne had watched a kindergarten-aged Maeve sleep, nightlight aglow, and thought of her husband’s funeral two years earlier, thought of her mother-in-law’s face when she kissed Maeve on the nose and Conrad Jr. tried to hide in the background of his son’s old law school classmates and professional colleagues. He had been discovered by a coworker in the garage at his office, the tristful boy in him externalized, an unlit cigarette nestled between the ring and middle fingers of his left hand.
“He was my son, too, Janie.” Jane eyed her husband nakedly. You failed him, she thought. You ruined him.
Jane had tried her best not to ruin him. On Conrad’s tenth birthday, Arletta left for the hospital at half-past six in the morning and, four hours later, Rex met Jane at the side door of his only home, his nephew standing placidly beside his sister-in-law with his head tilted against her leg in gentle curiosity.
The child moved easily through the home. Rex made pomegranate tea for Jane and brought water to Conrad in a plastic cup that predated the boy’s birth.
“You’re a very clever boy,” Rex told him. Jane smiled and wondered if Rex was trying not to say his name.
“Your dad and Uncle Rex have a complicated relationship,” she had told the young boy as she turned her key in the ignition. He’d nodded thoughtfully, bending one leg under the other, taking care to keep his shoes off the seat. “He doesn’t want your life to be complicated, too.”
“Complicated,” he repeated, considering, elongating the vowels indulgently.
“He would not understand but I know you do.”
“I understand.”
Conrad Jr. was distraught, in failing health, and aching for a conversation. But Jane left in silence, crying inaudibly, and drove to her husband’s childhood home.
It was in the smallest bedroom of this home that Maeve had stirred noiselessly on the eve of her first day of kindergarten. She was a thoughtful, reticent child, calm but curious.
There are ghosts in this house—they’re in your blood, too—
There are bones in the walls and the iron will feed the home, which like all living things requires sacrifice, dutiful and constant.
1.
When Conrad Sr. died he did it suddenly and with minimal fanfare. Arletta handed off her patients to a coworker and drove three miles—twenty-five minutes in mind-numbing traffic—from the best hospital in the state to the one where her husband of twenty-one years was to die.
Rex was a mildly hypotonic fifteen-year-old, his hair infrequently washed and biannually cut, and then shoddily and by his own hand. Conrad Jr. left with little more than his father’s name and his long-defunct pocket-watch, and he didn’t set foot in the house again until he had cut through forty-three years of fraternal estrangement, when he asked Jane to sit in the car with the baby and only emerged after a quarter of an hour looking like provocation itself. She had bitten her tongue preemptively when her husband signaled a left turn that should have been a right turn a mile away from the house.
When I remember him, it is as though he has not gone. Every intubation is a poem of which I have grown too fond. I stitch up the chins of clumsy children and try to picture my own at that age. My husband was a pious man and I made sure he had his last rites, and then I tied up the loose ends of his business dealings myself and I told the congregation to neglect me in my grief, cloaked over me and surrounding the home in fantastical range—the simultaneous loss of husband and son—death and hope married at last. Every stitch has its place and on most days I obey the laws of parsimony. He tempted fate, I’ve heard them whispering. Fate is a crass invention. Temptation, I know, is real—and no less crass. At work I am praised for being exacting.
When Arletta died her elder son was sixty-one years old and four days later he and Rex sat beside cousins and neighbors and churchgoing community members with long memories in a dimly lit, half-full funeral parlor. None of their faces looked familiar to Conrad Jr. Marianne stayed at home with the baby. Conrad could not have picked his grandmother out of a lineup. He had not ever seen her face except in a photograph now at least six decades old.
Jane dropped her husband and son off at home and drove meanderingly to Carlisle Ave. Rex was rocking gently on the porch when she arrived. She watched him shake his head continuously as she walked toward him, first sadly, the corners of his mouth upturned in a vaguely melancholic smile, and then because he appeared to be unable to tolerate stillness. He looked plainly, distinctly healthy in his stable and unceasing motion, creating small wrinkles in the black button-up he had worn to the service.
“I was hoping I would see you first,” he called out, his temperament improving perceptibly as he acclimated to Jane’s presence. “I can’t say how relieved I am.”
“Are you okay? Will you be okay?”
Rex, absolving them both with an all-encompassing wave, asked after his nephew.
So she wondered. She held a tiny quadrangle of her stocking away from the flesh of her leg between her thumb and forefinger and then released it, enjoying its recoil toward the bend of her knee. Jane told her brother-in-law of her son’s wedding, the books he read, what she could bring herself to say of his child.
“I almost cannot bear to be so crass, Rex, but—”
“It will be his if he wants it.” Again, he gestured expansively. Jane paused.
Two weeks later, Rex stood in the living room, watching his brother approach the house. Jane faced forward and the baby slept. He stalked up the driveway. He had aged poorly, Rex thought. Conrad’s hair was virtually devoid of both pigment and structure, and the skin around his eyes was swollen. His face reddened quickly as he moved.
The pavement was spotless, darkly reflective. Rex thought of chalk dust and weeds. The air was hot and clear, a sharp summer day couched between early September clouds.
Conrad’s breathing was labored and imprecise, heart pounding like he could still see the ghost who whispered your daddy’s dead, tell your brother, like he was still itching to drive away from something that didn’t have to try to follow him, something alive in the electrical impulses beneath his skin, the stain of his retina, all loss and dirt and blood.
Conrad did not think the home in front of which he stood unsteadily would ever house a happy, complete family. He wondered what it meant to give his son over to it, whether it was an attempt to better his son’s life or a routine sacrifice to the home itself.
“I’m your brother,” Rex muttered plaintively. He wasn’t sure if his brother could hear him and he didn’t care to speak up.
Conrad sighed heavily. “I will have nothing.” He shoved his finger hard into Rex’s chest. “Because of you.”
Maeve wailed implacably the whole way back to Wright Street. Conrad saw blood in her diaper, not for the first time. His son had taken a reluctant Marianne to the coast for the weekend, their first vacation since the baby’s birth. He moved awkwardly through his home, ill at ease in his own diseased body and loathe to be alone with Jane, which felt eerily like being left alone with himself.
Conrad Jr.’s life was circumscribed within his own failure to filter, which followed him between houses and lovers and contracts. He brought the baby to the pediatrician when Marianne was bedridden with the flu, afraid to breathe in the vicinity of her child, afraid to leave the child alone with her husband. She fell asleep on his chest when he fell asleep on the couch.
He learned that you can’t pass down an idea, a longing with any kind of purity—that the pain you inherit is earmarked for you in vain and with vain, mortal hope, but it is muddled already in the first act of abnegation, and in bequeathing the miasma of incomplete—of desperate grasping, heavy and stagnant—you only muddle it further.
So it was that Conrad III was cursed from the start. That was his inheritance. No extent of guilty assurance can beat the odds of replication and division. No pain that has scratched its sequence into the fabric of your identity can be sequestered, uncopied.
In her fifth decade, Arletta learned the same from living alone with Rex. Without boundaries between them, they struggled to connect. They grasped in the dark for congruence, something to smooth out the roughness, but they scraped and bruised themselves just looking. He cooked dinner and left the covered pot on the stove for her to eat alone in silence, deafening, absent-minded on the couch because her brain worked in tendons and bone and barriers, and she loathed the diffuse context of her home.
He was productive, strong, and occasionally happy; she was scared for him and wouldn’t admit it. They were both being absorbed back into the earth but she was going faster because she wasn’t fighting it. She thought she was his homeostasis. That his body would crumple like the rickety frame of a half-finished edifice, haunted, if she let go.
It was not long after her husband’s death that Rex sank because he knew what his brother had done for money and solitude. He was an uncomfortably deadened teenager. Rain fell intermittently, percolating into the carefully cultivated flowerbeds and soaking the recently paved driveway clean. Rex pawed at the earth frantically, wild with desperation, forcing his fingers through interstices of dead and dying flora before he realized with focused, visceral horror that he was attempting to separate dirt from dirt.
Arletta realized too late that it was only chance that gave the offending code to one son and not the other, let one go and enclosed the other, unaware and unseeing. Arletta cried silently into the crook of her elbow, the way she might angle a sneeze away from her hands, blaming herself. Blaming Rex, not because he was at fault but because he was there.
Not because she knew she didn’t love him but because she didn’t and couldn’t know that he loved her—the damned child to whom she whispered not lullabies but the way you clawed at my uterus I thought I was going to lend the spark of life to some impure pre-human creature with thin, breakable, impossibly destructive nails extruding at the wrong angle, sickly appendage, rot at the core—luxuriating in the belief that the people we love are never who we think they are, but we more or less get it right with the people we hate.
4.
To hear Marianne tell the story might give the impression that the Wisther’s were a cool, gentle people, a family into which she was satisfied, if not pleased to be absorbed.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about dad,” Maeve said, running a fork aimlessly through a mound of mashed potatoes. Marianne sighed.
“Me too,” she replied. Maeve stilled but did not look up from her plate. “It’s hard not to think of his Uncle Rex, living in this house. It’s hard. Your father visited him as a child. There were scars running down his arms. I didn’t see them but your father did. He said he thought of feral children, and he understood his father more”—her lips pursed—“but it didn’t help.”
Maeve said she used to think the house was too big not to be haunted. She ate slowly, as usual. Her mother told her what little she knew or had pieced together about Rex—alone in the basement of his childhood home, perpetually abandoned and abandoning, dark hair slick with perspiration.
At some point he was not a child and by then it was suddenly too late, the undressed window was gone, consumed by time in sand-grain moments and years that ushered decay (two of the second molars must come out, too, having been eroded beyond repair over the fifteen years that spread out between x-rays and what was visible like the carcinogenic fingers of the sun, intercalating, laying bare invisible scripts that feel familial despite their single origin).
His mother was strong and then she was dead. Such is the way with women. No blush or glow and no filial tears, just the taste of metal and a clap of dust that burst like panic in the air.
Rex returned to the house that was the site of his earliest memories—this before the legal battle began—and felt at ease and unconquerable. His brother clung to the illusion like his father did, the naming scheme worked, one must admit, but it would touch him no longer.
While Rex moved with ease in his home for the first time in decades, his brother sat with his only son in a dimly lit and understaffed bar, swirling a glass of gin. His son had switched to seltzer two rounds back, when an already-terse conversation lulled. His face was freshly shaven, which made him look like an old man in a young boy’s body.
“You know what I’m going to ask of you.”
“Yes.”
“You want to say no.”
“Yes.”
“I try to help you and you refuse me.”
“We will figure something out.”
“My father bought that house for me. I want it for you. It is ours. It is yours.”
“We will figure something out.”
When Conrad Jr. died, Marianne declined to attend his funeral. She thought of Maeve’s birth. She thought she did not love him, that you cannot love someone who would just as soon splice you like rope. She had loved her husband singularly. His father was in decay from the first time she saw him. He cast off the responsibilities of his younger selves when he tried to correct for previous missteps.
What had happened was this: Conrad Jr.’s son—the last linear remnant of the family which had unburied and buried Rex—married, bore a child, and died. On the other side of this routine mortality, Marianne and her daughter inherited the home to which Rex had first laid claim when finally both his brother’s festering legal pride and his own mortal hold were relinquished. So Maeve had lived in the house since her earliest memories of childhood, and since then she had seen her maternal grandmother biannually, on Christmas and her birthday, and her paternal grandmother not at all, and because she was a child she did not think about all of the people who had to die for her to end up in that house.
Marianne had spent weeks and then months convening with lawyers and accountants, knew a cadre of them on a first-name basis, could not believe it took so many advanced degrees to cobble her late husband’s affairs into something comprehensible and above-board.
Maeve grew up and, at seventeen, finally landed upon the question over which her mother had been agonizing since her birth. Marianne brushed a flat palm over the length of her skirt.
“He was an only child, like you. He was afraid of bumblebees growing up. Once a bee landed on his face and he cried and cried, but he wouldn’t move. A little statue of a boy in tears, but he wouldn’t move.”
“The serious stuff, mom.”
“He was a talented lawyer. People were surprised, sometimes, because he was kind and tolerant. But he was smart, too. He was sharp.”
“Was I too young for him to—to know anything about me?”
“He said you were the only thing he got right in his life, the best thing that could have come from him. That his heart broke the day you started preschool.”
The perfect baby. My disentanglement, deliverance. My hope.
“Oh.” Maeve’s voice was small and strained.
I know, I know. I know. But even so.
It was only after six months of living on Carlisle that Mari opened her bedside dresser and found the envelope containing the old, timeworn letter, undated and not addressed to anyone in particular but painstakingly transcribed in the neat, clipped handwriting of the intentional, and upon reading the letter Mari learned that Rex, following his mother’s death, had been utterly willing, perhaps even eager, to bequeath to her young family the house into which she had just moved, will be damned, but that Jane would not let him lay himself down for the Wisther’s—for a son who would never benefit—for damage that had already been done in the one act of creation available to a man who was decaying before her eyes.
Maeve vaguely understood that she would not meet the same fate, though her body required a certain level of maintenance and care. She was to set out on her own toward adulthood with no ill-begotten albatross of capital, no damned template from which each subsequent fleshly sin would arise. The man she had not had time to know as her father had bequeathed to her in loving and methodical style a trove of resources befitting an explorer who is the first of her kind.
Marianne had prayed for her daughter’s future with cavernous, agnostic trepidation. Her husband had swallowed his pride and his fear and replaced them with wealth more easily imparted.
He was really in love. Perhaps she was too but it wasn’t enough or maybe too much, too strong not to subvert it, pressing back on the bounds of her promise until she’d fallen into the ultimate betrayal—of God and of man, neither keen on absolution in point of fact.
Marianne’s husband had been dragged up to the plate of the thing he had supposedly been born to do, trained to do, the paternally sanctioned target of his interests and abilities, everything he had worked for and for which his parents had worked on his behalf—and he saw a reflection of himself and hesitated.
Rex is my uncle. I am your father. But he is my uncle. I held you in my arms moments after your birth and I prayed for this spark to be permanent, prayed that I had not passed down the strife that marred my future while it still stretched out before me—and you will tell me that you wish I had not prayed at all? I will tell you that you have saved me from nothing.
The high-cocked, autumnal reality is that his idea was to give himself over to a future compressed around him in exclusivity, not because his own purity led him down a path but because he saw his fallen icon stutter-step toward a congruence all his own and this he would not suffer—with no fear of fraternal shame, no passage of burden between older brother and younger, only a reclamation of the splintered shell in which the two had jointly and without discussion buried each other’s long-abandoned past lives.
One day we will forgive ourselves and uncurl our fingers from the brass railing, the blood we share will flow unrestricted and we will feel most acutely not the loss of pressure but the uncomfortable, heady sensation of becoming as we grow to fit the absence of our bonds—
They measure the plot into which they would inhume their depleted mothers and fathers and so fix the decay deep in the sole eternal wellspring of life. Their ghosts are deposited beneath the foundation of a home that will surely bury many more and, like hot air, they rise.
Haleigh Yaspan is a graduate student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and a graduate of Tufts University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Litbreak, Palette Poetry, and California Quarterly.