Floating Like the Dead

by Yasuko Thanh

  “It’s so odd.”

  “It’s not like Mother.”

  “No. She’d never leave dirty dishes on the table.”

  Helen collected erasers. Ones from the five and dime; pink ones made of Indian rubber; white ones like the chewy ends of marshmallows; little ones that fit onto the end of your pencil. Then there were the ones she brought home from the elementary school where she taught. She used these on the chalkboard and brought them home still covered in a fine dust that spotted the outside of her navy blue bag.

  Wearing her red slip, her feet bare, and sitting on the low upholstered chair, she would pull the erasers out from the blue bag along with the school books. “How on earth did these get in there?” she would always say when Frank caught her.

  Frank said nothing. He had never understood this compulsion for collecting erasers, though he wondered if it may have been a schoolteacher thing, just a harmless quirk.

  Eventually all the erasers ended up in her collection stashed under the bed.

  When she retired, Helen kept the all blinds in the house closed. At first she didn’t explain it to Frank, just closed the blinds whenever he opened them. Sometimes it was a game: open, closed, open, closed. A way of communicating without words, like signalling in semaphore. But Frank didn’t know what Helen was signalling. Only that when she was grumpy, the house was darker. On her better days, she might open one window a crack. She was all action, no message.

  “I’m embarrassed,” she said finally. “By how I look now. I hate mirrors.”

  “So that’s why you’re closing the blinds?”

  He held her close to him with his large hands. Her hair felt like feathers. “Kiddo, you make me laugh.” But as he held her, he could feel her whole body shaking. She was crying, without making a sound.

  On the night of their senior prom, Frank had driven Helen to Lookout Point in his dad’s Packard. He guided her through a forest of bracken fern down a narrow path. The promontory was still and quiet and they sat on a bald rock that looked like a hand as it jutted out over the farms below. Despite the moonlight, the land before them was dark and Helen arranged her prom dress to cover her ankles against the cold night air.

  “I’ve got two cupcakes that I stole from the dance,” Frank said, reaching into the pocket of his suit jacket. Tiny rosebuds folded into a paper napkin. The icing had fallen off in his pocket.

  He was the cutest boy in school. Maybe she would kiss him.

  When she took a bite of the cupcake, he watched her chin quiver. He knew he wanted to spend his life with her.

  They talked about school and friends and plans for their summer and for their lives ahead. Her blond hair shone in the moonlight. The air was perfumed by her shampoo.

  “Tell me something you’ve never told anyone before,” he said. “Tell me a secret.”

  Frank’s hand on her shoulder was warm and comforting, the way bathwater is after a long, cold day outside. And because he made her feel surrounded by warmth she said, “I was born with three ears.”

  His eyes flicked to her hair and then he looked down quickly, embarrassed by what he’d done.

  Helen placed his hand on her hair. “Silly. I don’t still have three ears. The doctors took it off when I was born. But, if you touch me, here – feel this part right here – maybe you can feel the scar.”

  He felt dizzy at her touch, and the sight of the creamy whiteness of her neck when she tilted her head toward him almost made him faint. He nuzzled his nose over where he imagined the scar to be. “If I asked you to kiss me, would you?”

  Helen giggled.

  Emboldened, Frank said, “I love you.”

  She smiled. “That’s silly. Try to kiss me.”

  “Oh. I just wanted to know if you’d say yes.” He paused. “By the way, are you going to eat that second cupcake?”

  “You! You!” she yelled. Then they were chasing each other around Lookout Point in the dark, miles above the farms that seemed to stretch on forever in the moonlight.

  When Frank was twenty-one, his entire engineering class was commandeered by the Canadian Officer Training Corp and for six months they marched up the university’s football field in their civvies, there not being enough uniforms to go around. Most of his friends were excited that they were training to kill Nazis instead of studying for mid-terms. Frank was not. A week before leaving for Normandy, Helen sat with him in her mother’s backyard. She was pulling blades of grass out of the ground and dropping them onto her saddle shoes. “I want to have a baby,” she said suddenly.

  His stomach flipped in a pleasant way. Frank reminded her that he was leaving soon.

  She wiped her hands, and they stayed green. “I don’t want to wait. Look how goddamn beautiful everything is. Every day that goes by is another goddamn day he’s missing.”

  The bridge of her nose, the way her long eyelashes brushed against the lenses of her glasses, her delicate collarbone, the nape of her neck covered in fine blond down, everything seemed to point at his staying.

  But of course he couldn’t. It was war.

  He went to France, returned, married Helen, continued his studies, and became an engineer.

  When Helen was pregnant with the twins, she often took Eulalie to the park. And while Eulalie played, Helen would shift her weight, putting her magazine on the grass, and she’d lean onto her on her side in the dappled sunlight next to the red playground slide. “When you two move inside me late at night,” she would tell the twins, “and there’s nothing but the sound of your daddy’s breathing, it feels like the three of us are floating up in space.”

  Five days went by. Alan and Barbara and Eulalie smoked, stared out windows, and made endless pots of coffee in each other’s kitchens as they waited for the phone to ring.

  “It means they were coming right back. The cake and the slippers.”

  “Coming right back, just stepping out for a single moment.”

  “Yes.”

  “The slippers waiting for her, set just so, beside the door.”

  “As if she was only going to be gone a second.”

  “Yes, that’s it. Just a second.”

  “Look,” Alan interjected, “someone’s got to say it. People who want to kill themselves don’t repaint their house or buy tickets for a holiday cruise.”

  Helen and Frank had booked their passage for a fourteen-day Adriatic cruise leaving from Venice in November. They kept the tickets on the dresser next to the framed picture of them on their wedding day. Helen gazed at the tickets whenever she brushed her hair.

  She imagined how, after the stopover in Dubrovnik, all the Italian papers would report on the Canadian couple who had locked their cabin, hung a do-not-disturb sign on their door, stepped out onto their balcony and, holding hands, let themselves fall into the sea. The part of the pact Helen disliked the most was dying so far from her children. But Frank had decided their dying at home would cause the children too much trouble, emotional and legal, especially if any of them were to assist Helen and Frank at their bedsides in the double suicide they had been planning.

  At her birthday party, Helen never mentioned they had cancelled their Adriatic cruise.

  A few weeks before, their doctor of thirty years had given them the bad news that Frank was dying. And even though he talked about cutting-edge treatments for colon cancer, Helen and Frank both knew there was a possibility that Frank might not make it to November.

  “How long do I have, Bill?”

  The doctor turned to Frank. “There’s no such thing as mathematics when it comes to life and death. Not even I have a guarantee I’ll make it home tonight.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  “Frank, I can’t say a month or a year. There are so many exceptions in both directions. So just don’t ask me that.” His eyes were full of tears as he looked away.

  When Frank had gone to work as a torpedo man during the Second World War, Helen had been forced to stare down the black-eyed, hollow barrel of the
universe for the first time. Now, she could once again feel the weight of her sadness keeping her in bed, pushing her eyelids shut so she couldn’t get up, get dressed, do anything, not even think.

  One night shortly before her eighty-third birthday, she said to Frank, “Does the universe think I don’t love you enough? Is that it?” She realized, even as she said it, how ridiculous it was to equate true love with forever. Love wasn’t everything: nothing was everything. Nothing was everything.

  “Let’s go for a drive.”

  Helen had been gathering plates and forks from the dining room table, scraping the leftover crumbs and icing from each plate onto the one she had set aside, on which she also piled the dirty forks.

  “Leave those.”

  “It’ll just take a minute.”

  “Leave them. For once.”

  The word once came down hard as a hammer stroke. Yes, thought Helen, for once in her life she would set the plate in her hand back onto the table. She’d leave the half-eaten birthday cake right in the middle of the table, surrounded by crumbs and the remaining mess from the party.

  She’d put on her shoes and take a drive.

  As they passed the turn-off for the casino, they neared the site of their first date.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “For old times’ sake.”

  The dusty gravel road that sliced through the wide belt of land between the Ghost and Red Deer Rivers was used only by mining and logging trucks. The sign read, “Road not recommended for travel,” but they have travelled it too many times to be bothered by its message, ignoring it on their first date and on the night of their senior prom and on all their subsequent visits to Lookout Point.

  Frank slows the car. They both look at each other. In a hundred years the road will be grown over with ferns. Everyone they know will be gone.

  He pulls over the car under the shorn light of the moon. Then, changing his mind, he puts the car back in gear and advances it a little farther down the banked edge into the scrub brush where it will be hidden by foliage.

  “Let’s go.”

  “To the lookout?”

  He stares straight into the thicket of evergreen.

  “Really?”

  He shrugs. Unbuckles his seat belt.

  Helen blinks at him, because he’s parked in the brambles where it will be difficult for her to get out of the car. But when he trains his cannon-shot eyes at her, she feels her cheeks grow red. He can still make her blush, sixty years on. They’ve been to this lookout many times, as teenagers, and then frequently before the kids were born. A few times after that, even, when their family was still young. But they haven’t been back in many years.

  He steps out of the car, pushing the branches aside for her so that she can get out too.

  Her fingers tingle.

  From his pocket Frank pulls a flashlight. He has always liked surprises.

  One day, for no reason at all, Frank sent her two dozen pink roses in the middle of winter. Sometimes he pulls the car over just to give her a kiss.

  She isn’t afraid, in spite of the sweat on her brow, the hair in her mouth, and her glasses slipping. It’s just that she’s having a hard time keeping up with him. The snow is hard to walk in.

  “Wait,” she says, “my glasses. They’re lost.”

  Frank sighs. “You need them?”

  “I’d like to see.”

  “All right.”

  Frank gets down on his hands and knees and so does Helen. The flashlight quavers over snow that is wetter and heavier than usual, and Helen can feel the damp of it soaking into her stockings, coating her knees. She pats the snow trying to find them, hoping she doesn’t crush them.

  “Found them,” Frank says.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  She follows, pushing on against the snow, over the slippery carpet of pine needles and fallen leaves underneath.

  At times Frank will stretch out his hand behind him, as he has always done, waiting for her to take it.

  Helen notices they have arrived in a grove of sorts, cedars armouring the path. The evergreens look as if they’ve been uprooted and dipped in snow.

  She slumps against the base of a cedar tree whose trunk is about as wide as a cradle.

  Helen delivered the twins at twenty-seven weeks, when the babies were just the size of sparrow’s nests.

  “Gone?” Helen said to the doctor, who stood there shaking his head. “It can’t be.”

  “Have you chosen a name?” the doctor asked.

  “Alan,” she said. “We had decided on Alan.”

  He passed Alan to her and when she unwrapped his blanket, his arms and legs flopped like a jellyfish – lifelessly, she thought – onto her chest, where she placed him over her heart.

  Frank sobbed at the edge of her bed. “It’s okay,” she said to him, “it’s okay.” And to Alan, she whispered in his ear how much she loved him, how much she wanted him. “You were so wanted.”

  “Helen,” Frank said, pointing at his eyes, “they’re staying open.”

  The nurse called it a reflex; but later, the doctors called it a miracle.

  She closes her eyes. It’s warmer now.

  Frank watches Helen as she sleeps. His little girl. He parts her hair and kisses the scar that marks where a third ear had been long ago. For a moment he wonders if he should carry her back to the car. But the car doesn’t have enough gas to make it back to the main road and would be as cold as an icebox anyway. Besides from this vantage point as long as he’s awake he can see the moon.

  “But what were they doing in the woods?”

  “Maybe they got lost,” Alan said. “Maybe they turned left instead of right. They were out of gas.”

  “But what on earth were they doing in the forest?”

  “If they were lost why didn’t they stay with the car?”

  Barbara said, “I like to think they weren’t scared.”

  HUSTLER

  Tiphaine had bought El Principe at Chato’s insistence. After a two-week vacation, he’d serpent-tongued her into spending her life savings to buy the resort. He’d whispered into her neck – making her hair stand on end – that he would never leave her side so long as she laid her heart at his feet. He said things like that, making her feel as though her life was romantically scripted. In Paris, working as a secretary, Tiphaine had been hopeful, if not happy. But she had not been extraordinary. Though she had only known Chato a few weeks, she had returned to Paris, sold her apartment, and doubled back to Honduras to marry him.

  Mostly, she didn’t regret her choices.

  The resort, which was nothing more than a thatch hut that tilted in the sand, was cool and shady, with bikinis and beach towels drying on the bamboo fence that encircled it. A waist-high counter set the kitchen apart from the restaurant, which was filled with wooden tables stained with candle wax and covered with oyster-shell ashtrays. Hammocks for rent overnight swung along both sides of the building. Through the lifeless remains of almond trees, you could see a corner of the ocean that resembled a white sheet tied on all four sides to docks and cays. In the distance, pelicans dove for fish in a bay as smooth as a pane of glass while local children pushed each other off a trestle bridge.

  The tourists who stayed in Cayo Bonaire came to sneak from life more than it had to give. It was a town of hot sky and listless dories, green crabs scurrying across the road, pizzerias painted yellow and red guarded by men holding semi-automatic rifles. It was a town where the fronds of palm trees waving in lazy breezes were sometimes the fastest moving things around. Still, it tempted all comers, like a woman who lets her hair down at dusk.

  The beach shared with the town both its grit and its wild beauty, and on Tiphaine’s days off, she would sit on one of the logs scattered along the beach and gaze down the far-reaching length of it. Today, the wind was blowing sand onto her legs, pelting her skin, reminding Tiphaine of the sting of fire ants. Beside her Chato rolled a joint, turning his back to the wind to protect the marijuana as he broke
up the buds into the brown curl of a dried banana leaf.

  Earlier that day, while balancing the accounts after breakfast, Tiphaine and Chato had had another one of their fights.

  “You can’t put three extra nights on his tab,” Chato said.

  “Why not?” Tiphaine answered. “Three nights. Five. What difference does it make? The tourists are all too busy being on vacation to notice. Besides, you make enough money selling them drugs. What do you care if I have a piece?”

  Tiphaine tried to block the memory of the argument the same way she tried to ignore the silver bodies of dead fish glinting on the sand. But even after she drained her can of beer to the last drop, she couldn’t hide from their eyes like open wounds, pale in their sockets. She trained her focus instead on Sebastian toddling to and fro across the beach, scooping handfuls of wet sand from the water’s edge and launching them like grenades.

  Last week, after being woken by the whoops of tourists, Tiphaine had sat up and been unable to spot Sebastian on the beach. Here the tide was known to pull things out to sea. Eventually, she’d found him beyond the boulders, splashing knee-deep in water. It was a miracle, really, that he hadn’t drowned. But Tiphaine had to fight the squeezing sensation in her chest at the memory because she didn’t want anything to ruin this day. They had left the cooks in charge of the resort, and Sebastian was now lying on his back, looking up at the blue sky, making starfish shapes in the sand.

  Two of Chato’s friends came by and sat on the log next to him, and they shared a bottle of cane liquor. Tiphaine chucked her empty beer can toward the growing pile by the river that divided the beach in two. Sebastian tottered toward the pile and thrust his thumb into the mouth of one of the cans and held it up in the air, thumbs up. Her happy boy. He could play with a piece of garbage like that for hours.

  In Paris, parents were always fussing over their children, putting them in sun-proof aqua suits and rubber-soled beach shoes, covering what skin was left exposed with chemically laden sunscreen, the thicker the better, as if they were icing a cake. People here did not fuss over their children in the same way, thought Tiphaine. Here, Sebastian was learning to speak the language of the sand, learning the sensation of the sun on his collarbone, the wind at his elbows. He would grow into the easy ways of men who always went shirtless and never wore shoes. He would never have an ordinary life.