The Possibilities

by Kaui Hart Hemmings

  “It took me a while just to go through his wallet,” I say. “This really helps.”

  “It hasn’t been that long,” Suzanne says. “You don’t necessarily need to do this now.”

  “I want to,” I say. “I feel good about it. Cully never liked stuff, you know?” I take a look around while we refold the shirts. It’s a childhood room vacated, then returned to as a resting stop. A bed, two side tables, his desk and computer, a stack of books from college, mainly geology texts. In his walk-in closet are the things I kept for him—old report cards and art projects, painted handprints, pictures of us, his life curated by me.

  “Did you notice I parked half a block away?” Suzanne says. “Part of my fitness routine.”

  Suzanne is seven years older than me, and while we never really knew each other growing up, our shared experiences make it feel like we’ve grown up together. We went to the same school, we both lived near the post office, our dads had similar jobs, and yet we yielded different results. She was popular in high school, went to college in New York, moved to Vail when her new husband was recruited there, and then moved here when she was pregnant with Morgan. We never would have been friends if it weren’t for our kids, but that seems to be how your social life is constructed post-children. You can’t imagine that girl with the red Land Cruiser who smokes cigarettes and ties her T-shirts in knots below her breasts will one day be your closest friend.

  I go to the drawers for his shorts and pants and take a glance at her BW body. My dad’s right. Suzanne has always been pretty “well-rounded,” but she’s gained much more weight in these past six months or so. I don’t know what to do about her, my very best friend. Sometimes she’s the person I imagine myself growing old with. She can make light of tragedy, expelling despair with a monologue, a joke, a few sound words—she sends it flying like a dead fish. She’s fun to talk with, see movies with, drink wine with, but lately I find myself feeling annoyed every time she opens her mouth or puts something in it.

  I’ve been narrowing in to things—the way she eats her vanilla low-fat yogurt, licking the foil top, her hand lotion that smells like deodorized feminine napkins, the way she stands too close. She’s a personal space invader and sometimes one of her breasts will graze my arm, making me feel like I’m being hit with a warm bag of porridge. The list of annoyances, once minute, has become noteworthy, and now her daughter has joined my queue. I think she feels the same way about me, tallying up my quirks and trying her best to ignore them. Sometimes friends are so unfriendly to each other.

  I put the boxers straight into the trash bag by the door, which gives me a feeling of guilt but also accomplishment.

  “This shirt smells like . . . girl,” Suzanne says, pressing one of the shirts to her nose. “Perfume. Smell.” She holds the shirt near my face. I get a brief whiff of strawberries, or a makeup manufacturer’s interpretation of strawberries. It’s the smell of childhood and boredom and it takes me to junior high, to the bench by Keystone Hall where the popular girls would sit, where she would sit.

  Maybe it was a girl, her head against Cully’s chest, leaving her scent like a business card. Her perfume outlived him. It could outlive all of us. I imagine Shay, all cleavage and lipstick. She’d saunter around the house, her lips parted. It was like watching a beer commercial, and I’m sure she engaged in all of the things beer commercials subliminally promise. Maybe it’s her. But not Gonorrhea—they weren’t his type. Cecilia—I hope not. She wore ninety-dollar T-shirts and called cigarettes “fags.” She once told me that she thought Marc Jacobs clothes looked pulled from the children’s section of thrift stores. She and Cully would watch these movies that were supposedly highly acclaimed. Mostly the films were about people sitting around and saying witty things or about robbers saying witty things. They were unbearable and I know she thought she was really deep for watching them, and that I was an idiot for not getting it, for not understanding the symbolism.

  “He didn’t have a girlfriend,” Suzanne says. “Morgan would have known.”

  Morgan would have wanted that role for herself, I think. “She didn’t know everything, I’m sure.” I try to say this lightly. “And I’d know if he had a girlfriend. He didn’t, though I’m sure there were girls.” Phone always ringing, activity always encircling, Cully calm in the middle, the eye of a hurricane. I go to the closet to carry out my dad’s books.

  “You sure you’re not smelling yourself?” I ask, and we both smile. Suzanne is always in a cloud of heavy perfume and she has a different scented lotion for every part of her body. They’re nice, though—her lotions and makeup that often make their way to me. She is the most generous person I know, and when I think back, the generosity to myself and others is always free of stipulations and expectations.

  I didn’t really notice before, but her scents always give me immediate comfort. It’s something familiar, soothing, and maternal, and I wonder if our friendship fulfills that mother role I never thought I missed or needed. I look at her hands, going through the books—books and movies about dead boys—and I’m mildly embarrassed by the recognition, the idea that this may be true. We even argue like mother and daughter, and maybe that’s why despite my annoyance with her, it’s supposed to be this way.

  “What is all this?” she asks.

  “Just books,” I say. “I don’t know where half of them came from.”

  My dad has begun to amass all this depressing literature, secretly storing them like nuts for some future hunger. I want them out, which is okay with him. He says they didn’t help, which makes me feel bad for him and his thinking that they ever could.

  I place the box on the bed and mumble, “I can’t believe how many of these there are, all on the same subject.” I pick one out: Boy, Interrupted. Then another: The Son Rises. Good God. “And they’re all about boys,” I say.

  Are they more interesting than dead girls? The thought leaves me chilled, and so does the thought of people across America going to a store or shopping online driven by their need for these books. It makes me want to cry, for both the need and the courage to look for help.

  The books seem to be making her uncomfortable. She busies herself with the clothes again.

  “In the books girls seem to be murdered,” I say. “Boys are killed when they’re being adventurous. Sailing the rough seas or slaying an Arab or shooting a lion.” Or outrunning an avalanche, I don’t say.

  I believe my theory is sound. The boys are conquering nature: a wave, a mountain, a volcano, an animal, a storm of some sort, all of which are a stand-in for some vague ideal. What is the ideal? What are they trying to do? What does that lion mean? Can’t boys just observe the lion from a distance? How about a game of chess? It doesn’t pain me as much to think of them this way—a vague everyboy, a character.

  “We’d better be more adventurous so we can avoid being murdered,” Suzanne says.

  “That makes no sense,” I say.

  “I know, I—” She picks up a book called Understanding Your Grieving Soul after an Adult Child’s Death. Such a long, exclusive title. Makes me think of those movies on Lifetime I find my dad watching: She Met Him in November. Claire’s Too Young to Be a Mother. So specific.

  “These can be really helpful, you know,” Suzanne says. “They’ve helped me a lot with Dickie. The anger, the sadness, the letting go. We all go through these stages. Divorce is a kind of death, and—”

  Okay, blow me.

  “—there are stages of grief. I find it comforting that we’re not alone. Big tragedies, small ones—”

  So we’re all predictable. Our DNA is practically identical to an orangutan’s. That’s just not comforting at all, nor is the thought of Suzanne and me going through similar stages. Divorce and the death of a child? I should at least be assigned different steps. But I know she’s just trying to be helpful.

  She groups together a pair of white socks with gray toes. Then she folds his ski pants—the black ones patched with duct tape. I remember the sound they’d
make when he walked. It was probably the most familiar sound in the world, the hiss of his snow clothes, or in the summers, the rolling sound of his skateboard on the ramp outside my bedroom window, the ramp I had removed. Suzanne pulls something out of the pants’ pocket, looks at it, then puts it in the garbage bag next to her.

  “What was that?”

  “A ticket stub,” she says. “For a movie.”

  “What movie?” I walk around the boxes and fish it out of the trash, stopping myself from looking at everything in there, like my father used to do in our kitchen trash. This tissue paper can be saved for Christmas presents! These bones can be used for soup! I learned his frugality was sourced in his love of shopping. We saved the bones and bought a pizza oven.

  “I asked you to put everything on the bed,” I say.

  “I didn’t know you meant things like that,” Suzanne says.

  “It’s exactly the kind of thing I meant.” I hold the ticket. The Other One. Cully once saw a movie called The Other One. He was at Storyteller Cinema, watching a movie. He put the ticket in his pocket. He wore his ski pants to a movie. How funny. How odd. How wonderful. “This is significant,” I say. “This is interesting to me.”

  “Sorry,” Suzanne says. She is folding clothes rapidly as if in a factory line. If they were Morgan’s clothes she’d take the time to look at each item, relating the back story.

  “I should know better,” she says. “I’ve been doing the same thing with all of Dickie’s stuff.”

  “Not the same,” I mumble.

  “But I’m realizing that a ticket stub is a ticket stub, a tie is a tie, not an embodiment of Dickie, right? If we weren’t getting a divorce, I wouldn’t give a rip about any of the crap he owns.”

  Here we go.

  “You’d think a man in his position would throw away his boxers when they got holes in them, but no—he just lets it all hang out. He may as well be wearing a skirt.”

  I’m a bad friend and I tune out. I listen to the music instead, which is oddly comforting, as if the rapper and I are in on something. That’s why we puff lye ’cause you never know when you’re going to go. What is “lye”? The street name for crack? For ice? Are those the same thing? Or is he saying, That’s why we puff live? Why the hell can’t these kids enunciate?

  I slide the box of books with my foot to the door, where a filled bag sits like a bouncer.

  Suzanne waves a receipt. “Mi Casa,” she says.

  I nod and she tosses. I consider retrieving it when she isn’t looking, but I won’t because that would be stupid. Stupid, stupid, dumb. I suppose I wouldn’t obsess over the little things if there were more of them. His room has so few clues. One poster on the wall—Never Summer Snowboards—not too many clothes in the closet, CDs, one motocross magazine, desk debris. I didn’t notice the sparseness when he was here, but now all I see is what little is left.

  I notice the smells of detergent and Cully’s deodorant. I run my hand down his hanging clothes. I find the navy-blue jacket I can’t bring myself to get rid of.

  “I’ll keep this for my dad,” I say.

  “That’s nice,” Suzanne says. She unfolds the Hog’s Breath shirt. “Can I give this to Morgan? She’d love it. Unless you—”

  “Go ahead,” I say, looking at the shirt, regretting it. I can’t believe how quickly this is going.

  “The other night she called,” Suzanne says. “It was really late. She was walking home from some party. She was so upset.”

  “About Cully or the divorce?” I ask, feeling cold that I’m struggling to care.

  “Both,” Suzanne says. “But it’s weird because I enjoyed it. I was happy that she was sad.”

  “That’s normal,” I say. “You felt needed and happy you could be there for her.”

  “But it’s so rare,” Suzanne says. “You know Morgan—so mature, always capable. For the most part she’s coping. She’s thriving as always.”

  Or more so, I think. Sometimes I think Cully’s death has made her feel more important, but I understand what Suzanne’s problem really is because I share it. She wants company down here. Her daughter has bypassed those initial stages of grief or did a crash course in them and now she’s soaring in her stage of acceptance. She is now the daughter of divorce. She is a girl who will remember her dead friend. She is Morgan!

  I was five when my mother died of lung cancer. I know what it’s like to be young and to move on. For the first time I wonder how my dad felt—to see his child mourn the loss of her mother, then the next day want to play with her friends.

  I wonder how he’s doing up there. I’m sure he’s enjoying Kit’s company too much. I’m positive he’s already asked where she’s from, what her parents do, how old she is, why she’s in Breckenridge, where she went or goes to college, what she wants to do with her life, and if she put ten percent of her earnings into savings. Hopefully he hasn’t asked if she’s on oxy whatever or if she’s a cutter.

  I place the folded clothes into shopping bags for the Salvation Army. They are just clothes, just objects.

  “What is it, exactly?” I ask. “The party at the Broadmoor.”

  “It’s just that,” Suzanne says. “A party.”

  “So, no speeches or—”

  “All I know is that Morgan has been working very hard,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say, detecting defensiveness and responding as such. “I just wanted to be a little prepared, let my dad know what to expect.”

  “It will be like a cocktail reception,” she says, suddenly assured. “A party. Just a little something where the college can recognize one of their own. In fact I think Morgan is setting a precedent. It’s never been done before.”

  For other dead kids, I can’t help but think. For dead alums. It’s strange the new ways I’m meant to feel good or honored.

  “I bought this for you the other day,” Suzanne says. She walks to her purse on the dresser. I can tell she has read my thoughts, maybe wants to corroborate, but that would mean taking something away from her daughter. She hands me a red bottle. “Love this stuff,” she says. “It’s some miracle skin cream made by monks in their rice paddy fields.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “Is it expensive?”

  “Of course.”

  “Does it work?” I ask.

  “I don’t know, does it?” She angles her face toward me.

  I look at her eyes, her forehead and smooth cheeks. She looks the same as she did last week, last month, last year. “You have such nice skin,” I say.

  I remember the pot I found and walk over to his bedside table and open the drawer. “Here. I have something for you too. Made by farmers in their marijuana fields.”

  I hand her the three baggies.

  “Oh wow,” she says.

  I have never seen anyone smoke so much pot besides Billy, Cully’s dad, but he was a kid then. Suzanne is almost fifty and this pot stuff is a new thing she’s taken up since the trouble with Dickie began, that and the eating, and she’s gotten very good at both.

  “And I have no idea what this is,” I say, handing her something with a cord and plug.

  “That’s a vaporizer,” she says.

  “What’s that?” In my day I have smoked from a hookah, an apple, a glass pipe, a Pepsi can, and a bong named “the reverend” but have never heard of a vaporizer.

  “It’s to breathe vapor and not smoke,” she says. “So it’s clean. Pure.” Then she adds, “And so parents can’t smell it.”

  We both raise our eyebrows at the same time and I smile even though there’s a tug—an irritation and shame that he kept a secret from me, but of course he did stuff like that. The shame comes from having Suzanne witness it. I keep moving, filling the bags, then moving them to the hall.

  “Well, go ahead and have it all,” I say. “Smoke it or vaporize it, or whatever.”

  “I don’t know,” I hear her say behind me. “I feel like I shouldn’t. It’s something of his and—”

  “For Christ’s sake, i
t’s drugs. If it was Xanax, I’d take it. I’m not going to frame it. He’d be grounded if I had found this before . . . ”

  “Sorry, I was just trying to be respectful.”

  “I guess I wouldn’t ground a twenty-two-year-old,” I say. “I’d just yell at him. I was always pestering him, nagging him.” My eyes water. I keep moving, willing away emotion.

  “He would have moved out soon,” she says. “He would have gotten it together.”

  I walk back in and over to the stereo and put in a different CD—an old one by someone called Common Sense. I like it. It’s rap, but not so angry this time. There’s a happy beat. He has a charming lisp. They say become a doctor but I don’t have the patience. That’s good. Clever. I take a deep breath, the emotion waning.

  Suzanne goes into the closet. I take another box of books to the door, scanning the titles on the spines: Death of a Grown Grandson: A Survival Guide, Lullabies for Bereaved Grandparents, and Chicken Soup for the Bereaved Soul.

  I have not read a single one of them. The only thing I read was an article I found on the internet the very day of his death. It was an article called “The Golden Hour”: the sixty-minute window a victim has after an accident to get help. It’s an hour of hope and promise, better outcomes and statistics. I was so desperate, so foolish, and I can’t believe I did that kind of research at that time. The day of his death. I must have been so lost.

  We were far beyond the golden hour. Even though I had already seen him on the pass, my dad and I had to go to the hospital to confirm his death with Dr. Braun, whose hair was a fortresslike hedge of frizz. She wore cargo pants, a turtleneck beneath her white coat, and heeled Crocs, which made her untrustworthy. I wanted an old doctor, a white male alcoholic one, the kind I grew up with. Doctors like that could unfreeze him somehow.

  Dr. Braun had said, “The parents of the other boys are on level three if you’d like to see them.”