Her Gorgeous Ribs

I'd been collecting the bones since I was nine. One might think it had to do with my father, but it didn't, at least, not in that way. I wasn't trying to fill a hole. I wasn't trying to recreate him. But, my father did have a good eye for a fine, swooping line, and when my grandfather unearthed the wishbone at our first Thanksgiving under his guardianship, I guess my father came out in me. It was supposed to be a new tradition for my younger brother, Luke, and me, in the wake of the death and our mother's continued unwillingness to have anything to do with us boys, that we'd preserve the wishbone until brittle, then snap it and wish for small gifts from the Wishbone Fairy. Luke had already decided he wanted a new Hot Wheels. But instead, in the midst of Thanksgiving dishes, I slipped the wishbone into the pocket of my basketball shorts. The shorts were a first for that Thanksgiving, too. Dad had always made us wear khaki pants and button-downs, but Grampa believed the most important quality in Thanksgiving pants was expandability.

After that, the bones became a regular thing, but not too regular. I didn't want to be found out. No one had expressly said it, but I knew implicitly that the collecting of bones, human or otherwise, was unacceptable, except if the bones belonged to something long extinct. It was this unacceptability, this wrongness, that for some reason made me cling to the bones even more. "Wrong" had somehow become a part of my identity. Even though the adults I knew, my father included, tried to treat Luke and me equally, there was no denying that they looked on me pityingly. For reasons no one could really explain to me, I was mostly disliked by other children, except for the sorry few who happened to be more wrong than I was.

Ribs, especially from chickens, weren't often missed. It was rare that I felt bold enough to take a leg. There were only two of those, highly noticeable when one was missing. Fish bones were the easiest and my favorite—tiny, inconspicuous to pluck from my teeth, translucent, and slender. Once or twice I thought Grampa saw me slip a bone into my pocket, but he never said anything about it, just drove me to the Field Museum for my birthday, the whole five hours from where we lived in Ohio, and we saw Sue the T. rex. Standing beneath her, I felt an anxiety like electricity pulsing through me, like when you place a hand on one of those glass orbs filled with purple sparks. I needed to reach out and release it. But no one was allowed to touch Sue.

What my father had liked was seashells, which were bones, in their own way. I knew his obsession had something to do with my mother because once, for an escape from a snowy January, Luke and Dad and I had rented a condo on Sanibel, where Dad found a small shell that looked like a unicorn horn, a turret shell, he called it. At night he got drunk and cried, pressing the turret shell into my hand. I went to sleep with the shell on my bedside table, but when I woke it was gone.

The other evidence I had for his obsession having to do with my mother, perhaps more concrete, was that in his goodbye letter Dad gave me the turret shell, but the rest of his shell collection, boxes and boxes of shells I didn't know he had, he requested be given to my mom, who didn't even come for the funeral. I knew the boxes were still in Grampa's closet, in case she ever turned up, along with the hunting rifle Dad had bequeathed to Luke because that was something they liked to do together, and that's what he used to end it all.

My first girlfriend I chose for her bones, and I suppose she chose me because no one else chose...