The Book of X

by Sarah Rose Etter

  “Big, special day,” she murmurs, colors scattered around her — foundations, blushes, eyeliners, mascaras.

  She blends the colors onto my face, the face over my face, the new mask.

  “How do you feel today? Excited?”

  “Yes, of course! Just my nerves...”

  I wear a white satin robe and the small sweat of a bride.

  “You’re so cute,” she hums. “Don’t worry, love is beautiful. Your whole life! Together!”

  My mother appears over her shoulder, eyes painted.

  “Are you sure she’s using the right colors, Cassie?” she asks. “Are you sure those are the ones you want?”

  A photographer snaps a picture.

  “Don’t take my picture! My face is all wrinkles!” my mother snaps. “Kidding, kidding, but just don’t.”

  The woman moves on to my hair, the heat of the curling iron cutting through the robe, the scent of my burning hair lacing the room.

  “Gosh, how beautiful,” my mother says. “Are you sure you don’t want to put your hair up? I always thought you’d put your hair up!”

  My hair curls down around my shoulders. “I’m sure,” I say.

  “It’s gown time,” the woman whispers, final touches on my hair done.

  “OOOOOOOH!” my mother shrieks as the camera flashes again.

  “CAPTURED! So realistic!” the photographer calls.

  “Come here,” my mother says.

  I move closer to my gown, which hangs lifeless on the hanger, sparkling in the sun.

  “Now, let’s get that robe off,” my mother says. “Slowly, slowly.”

  I shed the robe, standing in my white satin underwear set as she and the woman gently pull down the gown and unzip it slowly.

  “Now, in you go,” my mother says.

  I step into the open foaming mouth of the gown. My mother pulls the bodice up around me and pulls the zipper up just as slowly. She turns me around to face her.

  “Oh my god,” she says. “Just oh my god.” Another camera flash.

  “Come here,” she whispers, clenching my hand, drawing me to the mirror. The gown is heavy on my body, as if made of coin.

  “Are you ready to see?” she asks. “Yes,” I say.

  She spins me around by the shoulders, her nails pressing into my skin.

  “Would you look at my perfect daughter?”

  And there I am in the mirror: Perfect, smooth waist trimmed in sequins and tulle, perfect makeup, a face like someone else’s face, a magazine face.

  “You’re a dream,” my mother exhales, eyes gleaming.

  Henry waits at the end of the aisle, I know. I can feel him there, standing next to my father. I stare into the mirror, at the new costume layered over me, camera flashing again and again, my heart suddenly wild with joy.

  I KNOW WHAT LOVE IS NOW, AND HOW love likes to behave.

  AT NIGHT, HENRY SNORES BESIDE ME. Occasionally, he stops breathing altogether for long moments. Fear makes me softly prod him in the ribs until he fills his lungs with air again. I go on like this all night, pulling him back from the ledge of death.

  ◆The name Lazarus can be sourced to the Greek Lazaros, meaning “God hath helped”

  ◆In the Bible, Lazarus is the name of a man who was resurrected by Jesus in one of his most spectacular miracles

  ◆Lazarus has become a metaphor for rebirth, recovery, and rehabilitation

  “LAKES CAN APPEAR OR DISAPPEAR,” Henry says. “It all depends on the levels of groundwater or draughts.”

  Then we are naked again, we are making love again, we are never not touching, we are never not making love.

  All the history of the world has led up to this, to the rushes of pleasure between us, to our sweats mingling, to our loud call back to the universe.

  VISION

  I wear a diamond ring on my left hand. Each evening, we come home from work and sit down to a beautiful dinner of roast chicken, vegetables, and glasses of wine.

  After dinner, he reaches across the table to squeeze my wrist. Then, we collapse into bed again, exquisitely touching until morning.

  I CANNOT SEE BEYOND HIS LIGHT. I cannot see the cracks in the ground or the wife, until one day while I am running errands alone.

  It is a quick glimpse: She stands outside of the grocery store with Henry, not touching. His face seems strained in the sun or else my wishful thinking contorts his features. They step into the store.

  She is not at all what I pictured: Black hair, sharp nose, full lips, wide hips.

  I absorb the full blow of the scene, which takes a left punch to my jaw, shattering bone. I walk home, weeping in agony. Once home, I howl into my pillow as if a shot animal, bleeding from the gut, the red of life rushing out from the hole.

  “A SUBGLACIAL LAKE IS A LAKE THAT IS covered by ice,” Henry says.

  He touches me then, and the touch is a song which I have heard before and will hear again and again.

  NOW WHEN SOPHIA CALLS, HER VOICE strains over the line.

  “How’s it going with him?”

  Our bodies are constantly in bed, our hands always roving, how do I say it is a drug?

  “Fine, thank you,” I try. “How are the kids?”

  “They’re driving me fucking crazy!”

  Something shatters in the background, then screaming.

  WE MAKE LOVE AND IN THE MORNING, WE eat cake for breakfast. His mouth is full of frosting. I taste it later when we kiss goodbye.

  ALONE, I STARE OUT OF THE WINDOW AT the lake. I am dazed again. I climb back into my bed, bask in the fading scents of our bodies.

  The phone shrills.

  “Hello?” I ask.

  “Come home,” my mother says. “Your father’s heart is acting up.”

  WE SAY GOODBYE AT THE TRAIN STATION. Henry kisses me deeply in the sunlight. My heart isn’t in it. My heart is already on the train home, gone.

  ON THE TRAIN, THE LAND SHIFTS through the city and the wilderness. I see the skyscrapers then the dead body of a deer in the brush. A man snores next to me.

  In my head, I hum aorta to calm my nerves.

  The train pulls to a stop and I gather my bags. I climb down the silver steps and find my brother waiting for me with the red truck in the parking lot. He hugs me tight.

  “Well, if it isn’t my long-lost sister,” he says, eyes watery and drawn, the joke landing false even as he makes it.

  “What’s happening with Dad?” I ask.

  “He said his heart felt tight this morning. He was having trouble with feeling anything in his arms.”

  I nod and climb in the truck next to my brother. He navigates us over the land, we stay silent.

  The house comes into view. The asphalt beneath my feet feels too soft. My brother pushes the front door open, and my mother is crumpled on the ground, sobbing.

  “He’s gone,” she says between heaves, as if her heart is stopping and then restarting.

  “Gone?” my brother shouts. “Gone? Why did you make me go pick her up?”

  He collapses next to my mother.

  THE WORLD WARPS AROUND ME, THE walls bulging and receding, the ground swelling and pulling back in waves. My head bobs slowly up and down, tears streaming down my face, grief obliterating everything inside of my body. My brother holds my mother as she shakes and sobs.

  “Go be with him,” she calls. “I don’t want him to be alone, he shouldn’t be alone! Cassie, go be with him!”

  I do not want to see my father, but I move up the stairs slowly in the strange air of the house. I push his bedroom door open, heart pounding so slowly it might be stopping.

  DEATH HAS JUST BEEN HERE, I CAN SMELL it. My father’s body is in the bed, tucked into the covers. I don’t want to move closer, but I move closer. I don’t want to see him, but I must see him.

  At the bedside, I stare into his face: Eyes open wide, staring at the ceiling, drained of life, face settling back into itself, nose still a large red mountain, his mouth gaping open, rigid, as if stuck
in one last slow scream.

  I know I should cry, but no tears come now. Instead, I take his hand in my hand, his skin feels wrong, cold, gone, ended.

  LATER, MY MOTHER FINDS ME IN THE living room, her eyes bloodshot, hair at strange angles.

  She sits down on the couch beside me and then crumples, her knotted body going limp, her head falling into my lap.

  “I don’t want to live anymore,” she says into my legs.

  She quivers against me. I rest my hand on her knot. I stare deep into the mouth of a new void.

  THE NEXT MORNING, IT HITS ME WHEN I wake. I gasp for breath in my old bed, eyes to the ceiling, my father, my father, my god, my father, gone.

  ◆The word grief is derived from the Old French grever, meaning “afflict, burden, oppress,” and from the Latin gravare, meaning “to make heavy”

  ◆Grief is a multifaceted response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or something that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed

  ◆After conducting two decades of research, researchers determined there were five trajectories to grief:

  Resilience

  Recovery

  Chronic Dysfunction

  Delayed Grief or Trauma

  Suicidal Tendencies

  I TRY TO RECALL HOW HENRY FELT, WHAT it meant to kiss him. My mourning is too thick. I remember nothing, even when the phone rings, even when it is his voice through the line.

  MY FATHER’S WILL INCLUDES INSTRUCtions: The Acres will be sold, the profits divided by three among us, and he will be reduced to ash.

  VISION

  Ten years old, in my father’s truck, the wind whipping through the window as he drives us over The Acres. His hands are rough on the steering wheel from hauling meat. He doesn’t smell like liquor.

  “I don’t tell it to you enough,” he says. “I’m not really that way, you know.”

  “Tell me what?” I ask, distracted by the land whipping by.

  “I do love you,” he says.

  “Love you, too.”

  Then it gets quiet. He keeps driving like nothing has happened, though there is a small warmth in my young chest. His favorite sad song is playing on the radio. Tears begin in my eyes and I hide them by staring out the window.

  THE ROOM IS MAGNIFICENT IN SIZE. IT IS cold, refrigerated. My father’s body rests in the center, draped in the white sheet.

  “I simply need a family member to identify,” says the coroner. He has a nose as if from a statue, skin waxy and un-sunned.

  My mother wails from the hallway where my brother holds her. It has stayed this way since his death: My brother holding my mother while I make the arrangements.

  “Are you ready, miss?” he asks.

  I nod.

  He lifts the sheet and I see my father again.

  His face sits still as a mountain, the high peak of his nose, the valley of his lips. His mouth is no longer frozen open, his eyes too are now lines.

  “How did his mouth close? How did his eyes close? Who closed them?”

  “Miss?”

  “Who closed his mouth? How did it come to close?”

  “We took care of that very gently, miss. It is a delicate thing.”

  A cold body now, stiffer than when I last saw him, clenching in on itself. I reach to touch his hand beneath the sheet, and I draw back from the claw it has become. He is no longer hauling meat, no longer drinking, the breath gone. The ache in my heart could stop the world, stops my own breath so I am like him for a few still moments.

  “This is my father,” I say.

  The coroner drops the sheet.

  “That’s all, miss,” he says.

  He guides me away from my father. I can still feel the pressure of his hand on my lower back, propelling the base of my spine.

  Then we get into the car and I drive us home, my mother trembling in the front seat. Later, in the night, they start their fires for his body.

  ◆During cremation, the body is placed in an oven that reaches 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit

  ◆Large magnets pick up metal fillings and body replacements after cremation

  ◆A pile of bones is left behind after cremation

  ◆The bones are ground into ashes which are given to the family

  BEFORE THE SERVICE, WE CREATE A COLlage of his living. In snapshots: My father laughing in the quarry, my father young in swim trunks next to the river, my father as a chubby child, my parents on their wedding day, eyes roaring like hot stars.

  NIGHTS, MY MOTHER SEIZES WITH HER grief until the prescriptions come in. Then, we gather around each evening to slide the white pills into our mouths, the three of us, our new ritual. I climb into my childhood bed, sleep thinly.

  ◆The custom of wearing unadorned black clothing for mourning dates back to the Roman Empire, when dark-colored wool was worn during mourning

  ◆In the 1300s, the color of deepest mourning among medieval European queens was white

  ◆In Hinduism, death is not seen as a final end; relatives should not weep, but perform funeral rites to the best of their ability

  ◆In Judaism, the central stage of mourning is Shiva, which occurs for the seven days following the funeral; mirrors are covered, and a small tear is made in an item of clothing to show a lack of interest in personal vanity

  THE VIEWING IS OF MY FATHER’S URN, which is a large metal sphere. We set up the collages of my father’s life around the urn, which gleams its fresh silver in response.

  The crowd is thin, a few men from town, a few distant uncles. Sophia arrives with all of her children, who cling to her or climb beneath the chairs and rattle the legs like prison bars. I cannot keep track of them all. She hugs me in close.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says into the pink curve of my ear.

  But I am no longer in my body. I am orbiting the scene, I am a moon floating above the voices reading the eulogy, above my body as I recite the old poem he loved, above the orchids which turn their deep faces toward my father, the man now made of ash.

  VISION

  We ring the brass bells three times. The noise echoes through all of the streets in the town. The sound is followed by the quiet of mourning. The sound of the bells rung three times means only one thing: The king has died.

  The king’s body is a bed in the sun in the castle. His body is poised in fine garments and capes, although cold. A small stench radiates from him. His crown remains on his resting head.

  I kneel beside him with my mother and my brother. We wear bright white gowns to show the velocity of our sadness.

  Later, the funeral procession fills the streets. The bodies of men and women press against each other to get a view of my father’s casket. From the carriage, we watch women bellow sobs, and men raise their hands in salute.

  “None of them even knew him,” my mother sobs.

  The cemetery is lush rolling hills. The green grass is vibrant beneath the blue sky. My father should be buried on a day like this.

  The priest says some words over my father’s body, which resides beneath the wood of a coffin that is draped in purple cloth.

  They lower my father into the ground and begin to heap dirt over the coffin.

  My brother stays silent. He wears a sash over his suit, sadness and a new future in his eyes.

  A WEEK LATER, WE SELL THE ACRES AT auction. One of the town’s new young businessmen buys it all.

  “How does the Meat Quarry look these days?” he asks me over the table of our legal documents, a flirt in his eyes.

  I picture the quarry: faded red, lifeless, dried-up meat.

  “You’ll see for yourself,” I say.

  I GUT THE WHITE HOUSE WITH MY brother. My mother goes into town to drink or rests in her bed.

  We tear down the curtains, take off the white linens, roll up the rugs. The process takes days. I move through them muted, dismantling every bed, shuffling through photographs, selling off the furniture, piece by piece.

  Sometimes in my sweat, I look up at him.

&
nbsp; “Don’t do anything stupid, OK?” I say.

  I stare him deep in the eyes, too, so he knows what I mean.

  “You don’t do anything stupid either,” he says.

  He crosses the room, gets close to me, stares into my eyes.

  “Promise me,” he says. “Say it. Tell me you’ll call me if you get any stupid ideas in your head.”

  A true love swells up in my throat, our bond glimmering and silver between us. I want to sob.

  “I promise,” I say. “Now you promise, you promise too.”

  “I promise,” he says.

  Then we go back to it, back to the slow removal of our family from a place.

  THE AIR OF MY FATHER’S OFFICE IS ABANdoned and stale. No one has been here in some weeks. Dust clings to my fingers when I run my hand over his desk. I sit down in his chair, feel the worn areas his body sunk into.

  His drawers are filled with small bits of his life and ours.

  I find in succession:

  An old tube of Vaseline

  A small velvet pouch with a golden compass inside

  A small photograph of a topless woman I do not recognize

  A scrap of paper with his handwriting that says: “Remember, they’re all assholes and that’s got nothing to do with you.”

  I laugh at the last bit until suddenly I am sobbing.

  IN THE LATE AFTERNOONS, I SLIDE INTO my mother’s room. My mother sleeps heavily, the sleep of grief. She curls around her knot, only waking to weep and then sleep again.

  IN THE LATE AFTERNOONS, I SNEAK THE white pills from my mother’s bottle. I am saving again.

  GRIEF DESCENDS AND THEN STAYS, A thick black fog around me. The sadness radiates off of me, whispers death, death, death.

  MY MOTHER’S DRAWERS WERE FILLED with lockets of our baby hair, our small old teeth, small scraps of paper with her lilted handwriting. I could only make out fragments.

  in my dripping (pain)

  the color of dead grass

  someone will remember us

  someone in some future time

  will think of us

  I have lived with a curse