Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review reader Joshua Olivier on why he recommended “Beyond the Storm, the Night is Peaceful” by Daniel Mazzacane for our Fall 2022 issue. You can purchase the issue here.
I loved “BEYOND THE STORM, THE NIGHT IS PEACEFUL” as soon as I read an early draft as an undergraduate, four years before asking Dan if he would be interested in submitting it to Michigan Quarterly Review. I love this family, who both know and do not at all know each other. I love their labored striving towards understanding and connection, the immediate sense of stakes and feeling established in the first scene, where Calliope’s father, Tracy, urges her to be honest with her boyfriend about the fact that she is pregnant. Dan knows his characters’ fears and motivations and desires; he knows the culture and codes of California’s working class.
“BEYOND THE STORM . . .” makes me laugh, makes me think, makes me believe that people—even as they fumble, even when they don’t know what to say to each other—want to be good, and that they want to be good towards others. These characters, like so many of us, are faced with a situation that they do not know how to handle, that is bigger than themselves. And in depicting their floundering, the story is always rooted in empathy, always sensitive to why the characters are acting the way they are acting.
Yes, this story glows with that unique quality I always look for as a reader: heart. Reading “BEYOND THE STORM,” I feel in direct conversation with a writer who knows and loves his characters. One of the greatest strengths of this story is Dan’s dialogue. The jesting between Calliope and her boyfriend, Connor, reveals their intimacy, even as they struggle to work through and talk openly about their relationship, about the pregnancy. Dan’s characters feel alive, his world feels lived in, and he creates and maintains a sense of tension from the first sentence to the last. This story makes me, as I hope it makes you, excited to experience more of Dan’s work in the near future.
Calliope is on the couch watching Friends reruns when Bryan’s phone rings. She’s got two missed calls of her own. She knows what’s coming. Down the hall Bryan says, “No, she’s home.” And then, “Maybe her cell died.” Calliope presses the curved corner of her phone case into her thigh until it hurts, the plastic squeaking against her jeans the harder she pushes. Bryan waves from the doorway, mouths “Connor,” and points to the phone cupped against his chest.
“I’m trying to watch a show,” Calliope says.
“Your phone dead?” Bryan says.
“Who’re you? The fucking phone police?”
“Calliope.” Their dad, Tracy, comes in from the kitchen, dish towel in soapy hand. “What’s the problem?” He watches Calliope with a familiar kind of tiredness, his eyes reddened at the edges, dark irises fixed blankly, mouth flat.
She twines her fingers around a loose button on the couch cushion. Pulls it to the length of its string and twists it around the tip of her pinkie until the skin chokes purple-red. Her dad found her crying in the bathroom last week. Face flushed and puffy, carved up by wet and silence. He had wandered through the door in his pajama pants at two in the morning.
“Bryan—out,” her dad says now.
This is what she looks at when Tracy sits next to her—when he takes her hand and untwists the thread: the fireplace below the television, logs burned down to ashes and a soft amber glow. Night winds blow chill down the chimney, sweep motes of ash out across brick tiles and onto the carpet. There’s a smudged ring around the fireplace that no amount of shampoo has ever managed to get out.
“How many times has he called?” her dad says.
“Plenty.”
“Don’t be smart.” He holds out his hand for the remote and waits for her to pass it over. “How long have you been dodging that boy?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Give me your phone.” She senses a subtle break in his command, Tracy’s frame sagging forward over his knees, head tilted like he’s trying to hear her.
Her thumb hovers over her lock screen, taps twice, swipes her code. “A while,” she says.
“I raised you better than that.”
Calliope laughs. Harsh and short, stuck in her throat like a cough. “Here I am.”
“He’s got stakes in this too.”
She might laugh again. It builds in her chest until her eyes water. Her dad sits all bent up, not looking at her, one hand covering his mouth. Her phone leaves a blue-white aura over the gold from the fireplace, leaves him washed-out pale, like the more missed calls he sees the less he’s a part of this. He settles his weight back into the couch and gives her the phone.
“You know how you got your name?” he says.
“Got it when I was born,” she says.
“I chose it. Your mom, she named all the boys. But she let me name you.”
She’s heard the story before. The way her parents argued for weeks, until she crashed into their lives early. Her mom had named all four of her older brothers and named Eddie, the youngest, too. Said Calliope’s dad was lousy at names, reached for the fanciest thing he could find. But, exhausted and strung out from an epidural, Tracy cradling their only girl in his hands, her mom gave the reins over. Calliope’s fingers squeeze around her knee, knuckles creaking. The way her dad smiles at her and the strain in his voice grinds against her. He’s trying to connect and she knows it. Probably wants to talk about that night in the bathroom. How he took hold of her arm and she made a small, wounded sound at the contact. She’s always been good at keeping herself inside until someone touches her. He touched her arm and she broke and stood there in her bare feet, crying. Neither of them had anything for the other then or now. It’s not a conversation they can have. It’s not a conversation she wants to have.
In the living room, with only one lamp turned on and the rest of the house dark, they measure each other. Tracy and Calliope process fear the same. It eats at them slow from the inside. Leaves them hollowed out and vulnerable. It shows on their faces in the lines around their mouths and on their foreheads, clamped tight around emotion. Tracy has carved ridges through his skin, pitted scars from years wielding a saw in the forest. Calliope’s are slight. Lately, in moments like these, like last night when she told him that she was pregnant, she wonders what he sees in her—the first traces of age creeping across her face? The way she plays at adulthood? The way she has no choice.
“You’re acting like a child.” He says it like he wants to be mad at her. Then after she gets up and goes to her room and leaves him there on the couch, he says, “You’re just a kid.”
*
Bryan knocks on Calliope’s door later that night like he’s already coming in. She glares from her place on her bed and waits for him to leave, but there’s no waiting him out. He knocks again, then again.
“Get outta here,” she says.
The door opens and he leans there, Bryan built tall like their dad, with their mom’s broad frame and some of her round face. It leaves him looking handsome in a young way, like he never exactly grew into his manhood. The thickness of his neck and arms keeps anyone from pointing that out.
“Didn’t say you could come in,” Calliope tells him.
She groans and rolls onto her stomach, her back to the door.
“You’re gonna tell Connor, right?” Bryan finally says.
Calliope scrolls down the feed on her phone, not really seeing anything, not really trying to. “You want me to say yes?”
“Connor’s my friend,” he says.
“You tell him, then.”
It gets quiet again after that, quiet enough that she thinks Bryan might have left. Despite his height, he can move through the house easy; he never wears shoes, hates drawing attention to himself.
“Dad’s expecting you to turn up for the game on Friday,” Bryan says.
“Pass.”
“Not a request.”
She flips onto her back, a righteous kind of fire in her all of a sudden. “And who’re you, telling me what I’m doing with my weekend?”
Bryan stands there the same as he was, one ankle tucked over the other, arms crossed.
“It’s not me. Just Dad.”
“It’s your game. Tell him I’m not going.”
“It’s tradition.”
Bryan’s voice gets soft in a way that stokes the fire in her. She wanted a fight, not his gentle kind of hurt.
“I’m not coming.”
“It’s the playoffs. We go to the state finals if we win. I know shit’s hard right now, but you’re acting a mess.”
“You don’t need me there to win,” she says. “Take Connor to your game.”
“You’re the one got yourself into this. Don’t take that out on me. It’s tradition,” he says again. “Pete’s before the game for baklava and sodas. You don’t come and we don’t win.”
It’s Calliope’s turn to make a choice. She knows Bryan doesn’t get angry unless he’s hurting. He’s been like this their whole life, getting into fights over harsh words that stick in him too deep. Tracy calls him sensitive. Really he’s more open than any of them. She envies that, the way anyone can see the hurt in him, and it never seems to make him feel small. Even now she’s aware of him looking, the little bit of hurt wrinkling his brow, and she shoves down the urge to flatten herself, face blank, eyes fixed on the spot to the right of his head, so she doesn’t really have to look at him.
The way he stands in her doorway with the tight line of his mouth and his arms crossed, it’s like he’s protecting himself from her, and she thinks how she and her brothers and her dad all shoved together on crowded wooden bleachers would’ve been easy. The crack of ball on bat and the scuff of bodies in the dirt. It would have made things feel normal, like nothing had changed yet. Like maybe, if they all really put in the effort, nothing had to change.
“I’m not going to your game. You can tell Dad whatever you want about that,” she says.
*
The after-school rush is always the same. Bunches of teens overflowing the sidewalk into the bike lane, waiting for the flock of school and city buses that come through. She watches James Garner standing by himself, phone out, checking the time, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He takes the three down to the elementary school to pick up his little sister Evie every day. She’s in Eddie’s class, third grade, and only getting bigger. Calliope finds her way to a green bench next to a pole with bus schedules tucked into a cubby. She shifts her backpack higher onto her shoulder, one arm wrapped around her middle, and grabs a schedule. The number one shows up at a stop a few blocks away in thirty minutes and goes straight out of town to the highway and Madera. From there it’s a straight shot on a Greyhound to Fresno. Then what?
Under the bus stop awning are a couple kids from her third period. One of them, a girl with frizzed out, rust-colored hair and braces, goes to Calliope’s church. She’s got an arm wrapped around a boy wearing the red polo and khakis of a Target employee. That’s where she’ll have to shop for clothes when she gets bigger, head down browsing the rows of maternity pants, the eyes of the boy in the khakis on her, and then he and the redhead talking and laughing and staring at school, because there’d be no hiding it then.
Catherine Lewis came to the same problem their freshman year. Everyone knew, even if she wasn’t showing that much. She went to Fresno on the bus, to the Planned Parenthood on Fulton street. Everyone said that Catherine didn’t regret it, even after getting kicked out of her parents’ house. Calliope never had any reason to get to know Catherine, but now, in the press of after-school bodies and laughter, she wishes she had. She wants to ask her how she did it. Survived the way people treated her. Catherine Lewis kept some kind of normal and was going to graduate in the spring. Calliope stares down at the little pamphlet in her hand.
Catherine Lewis didn’t have to live with the way birth breaks a body. Calliope’s heard horror stories at family gatherings. Cousin Leti had almost three hundred stitches inside and out. And there’s the specter of her mother lying in a little hospital room, her skin all pale and sticky from sweat, tight curls plastered around her face. All of them kids standing around the bed, Calliope only seven and hitched up on Terry’s hip, clutching at her oldest brother’s shirt. Her dad crying, and the smell of copper and antiseptic thick in the room, Baby Eddie squalling in his blue blankets on her mom’s chest. She’d looked like all her insides had been ripped out of her, skin sagging, paper gown and blankets hanging loose everywhere. Not like her mom at all. Doctors echoed the words postpartum preeclampsia, something Calliope wouldn’t understand until she was sat in freshman year sex ed with a list of all the ways pregnant women die plastered on an overhead projector. Her mom’s heart wouldn’t quiet, going wild at odd times, and it was weeks before she could come home with a new bag full of meds and a sadness she could never stop carrying.
The buses come into view and the crowd shoves forward. Calliope busies herself with her schedule, an angry burning behind her eyes as all of her clamps around the urge to cry. Then there’s a hand in Calliope’s. “You ready to go?” Connor says.
“No.” She says it too fast, as if he spooked her. The next school bus, her bus, is pulling forward. “I don’t have time. Dad’s making chili for Bryan’s game. Today’s prep day.”
“Look, I’ll drive you home after,” he says. Connor’s thumb rubs little circles into the back of her hand. “We haven’t talked in a week. Let’s have some fun.”
Calliope wants to tell him then, right there, with the whole school surrounding them and the rumble of engines and the way the clouds smother the mountains. The way he sweeps her into his arms, pressed tight to the warmth of his body, the smell of him, sawdust and sap and cheap body spray. Everything threatening to swallow them both and her trying to find words and him smiling at her so sweet that her heart aches. She wants to pour herself out until there’s nothing left.
She lets herself smile.
*
Calliope sits in the backseat of Connor’s car while he’s in the Chevron grabbing snacks. She knows what he’ll come back with: two Slim Jims, pickle flavored chips, A&W, and a bag of mini crumb donuts as a surprise for her. He’s always like that—small gestures.
Soaked, Connor presses his face to the streaming glass and then comes in, all wet plastic rustling and the hard hush of rain.
“Donuts?” she says.
Connor tosses one of the bags into her lap. He sprays water everywhere when he shakes—the windshield, her face, the bags. “We going to the drive-in?”
“It’s still showing Iron Man, same as last week,” Calliope says. She holds a donut out.
He eats the donut right out of her hand, making an exaggerated chomping noise as he takes her fingers and palm into his mouth.
“Fucking gross-ass,” she says.
“You love it.” Connor sticks his tongue out. “My place, then? Netflix?”
Her fingers feel sticky with a tacky clinging she can’t rub away. Connor grins like he already knows what she’s going to say. The same way she knew about the donuts and they knew they weren’t really going to go to the drive-in. Predictable sameness. Comfort.
“I wanna go home,” she says.
“You okay?”
The rain picks up against the roof of the car and Calliope closes her eyes. She could lie about the game again. Using Bryan as an excuse would be so much easier. You’re going to tell Connor, right? She feels suddenly lightheaded with the way the storm rocks the car. Her stomach heaves and settles.
“No,” she says.
Why couldn’t he have stayed in the Chevron a little longer? She just wants everything to slow down. That damn pregnancy test. A little chunk of plastic clutched in her hand in the bathroom with the door closed. The whole house dark after ten p.m. and her alone, staring down at a pink plus sign. She thought she could ride out this feeling. That maybe telling him would get rid of the nervous lump in her chest and stop everything from spinning out.
“I want to break up” she says with her eyes closed, slow, to control her shaking.
“We can still go to the movies,” Connor says.
“Did you hear me?”
“Iron Man isn’t that bad.”
“Connor.”
“I heard you. You’ve thought about this.”
“I have.”
“What’s actually wrong?” He leans toward her, trying to catch her eye. “You’ve been weird all week. You want to break up—sure—why.” He isn’t smiling exactly, but there’s a softness to his face. He reaches out, touches her cheek.
She eases into the touch, pressing her face into the palm of his hand. “You’re the fucking worst.”
Then she says it: “I’m pregnant.”
“Yeah, okay,” Connor says.
She lays her hand over his. That’s when he gets scared. It takes over his face quicker than she thought it would, sweeps left to right as all of him opens up, eyes and mouth wide. He breathes out slow, his fingers trembling against her skin.
“Fuck,” he says. “Oh. Oh, fuck.”
He really starts shaking then. The more he shakes, the more solid she feels. Connor is always so damn consistent and in this moment he’s scared and maybe it isn’t fair but all she wants is for him to act like this is no big deal. They’re going to be okay.
“What are you going to do?” he says.
“Me?”
Connor takes her hands. Squeezes them. Drops them. Pushes his fingers back through his tangled hair. Takes her hands again. “What are we going to do?” She doesn’t know. She doesn’t have an answer for him.
“Your dad know?” he asks.
“Of course he fucking knows,” she says.
She thinks about her parents, how they used to dance in the living room to Tracy’s old country records, her mom’s long, curly hair let down from its usual bun, wild, twisting through the air as they spun, her voice raised with the music. The way she smiled, dimples in her cheeks the same as Calliope’s that made her face look so young. . Connor turns and puts his keys in the ignition, the roar of the car jolting her. The idea comes to her again, Catherine Lewis and her solution.
“I can get my own self home. There’s a bus stop—take me there.”
Connor sits, slowly deflating. “Cali, it’s pouring,” he says.
They don’t talk or play the radio or touch each other. “I love you,” Connor says at the bus stop.
She can see the white of his knuckles on the steering wheel and the muscles in his neck and shoulders standing stark against his shirt. More than anything, she wants to run her fingers along the fine, curly wisps of hair at the base of his neck, down over those taut muscles until they relax, until he can let her go.
“I love you too,” Calliope says. Then she gets out of the car.
To read the rest of “Beyond the Storm, the Night is Peaceful,” you can purchase the issue here.
