by Megan Hart
“You’re very flexible,” Dan said. “I think I saw a few positions in that book you’d be good at.”
I laughed, though this phone call was making my stomach churn. One call would have been nothing unusual. Four meant my mother. I punched in the buttons to access my voice mail, listened to the message, deleted it. Calmly. Without outward reaction. But when I saw him looking at me quizzically, I knew that I’d merely thought I wasn’t reacting, when in reality, I was.
“You just went the color of chalk.” Dan rubbed my arms. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s my dad,” I said in a faint voice not very much like my own. “He’s dying.”
Chapter 17
If I’d had my choice, I wouldn’t have had Dan come with me. He didn’t ask me, however, what I wanted, and so I found myself bathed, dressed and in the passenger seat of his car before I really had time to think. It was good he drove me. I’m sure I’d have had an accident. I couldn’t even get the seat belt to click, as my fingers fumbled it too much. He had to reach across and buckle it for me.
We made it to the hospital in time for me to say goodbye, though I didn’t have much to say. My mother had set up a vigil by my father’s bedside, and she wasn’t about to allow her position as the Martyred Widow to be preempted by the Prodigal Daughter.I did what I could. I sat at his other side, holding a hand that felt as dry and brittle as sticks. This was the man who had taught me to read. Who had taken me fishing, taught me how to bait a hook. Taught me how to whistle like the boys did, with two fingers. This was the man who had walked me to the bus on my first day of kindergarten and had been the one to cry when my mother had not.
This man was my father.
He died without a few words of pithy wisdom. Without even opening his eyes. I waited, my two hands holding his, for some revelation. Something. Some sign he knew I was there. That he cared. That he was sorry, maybe, or maybe that he wasn’t. I waited for acknowledgment, but in the end he just slipped away without bothering to give me anything, and I was outraged and disappointed and struck sick with grief, but I was not surprised.
My mother didn’t seem to know he’d passed until I put his hand down and got to my feet. She looked at me with narrowed eyes and a small, hard smirk. “Coward” that look said. “Running away again.”
“He’s dead, Mother.” I sounded cold and hadn’t meant to.
She looked at him. Then she began to wail. She keened and howled like the mythical banshee. One that’s come too late to warn the living of death but in time to shriek it’s already happened.
Nurses streamed into the room. I was pushed aside, backed out, ignored amongst the bustle of their preparations, and I didn’t care. There was nothing for me to do in that room. My heels clattered on the industrial tile in the hall. I heard them telling my mother to calm down. I heard them suggesting she be given “something.” I heard silence a few moments later, but by then I was already at the end of the hall and pushing through the doors into the waiting room where Dan sat on a couch the color of frat boys’ vomit and sipped coffee from a foam cup.
“Elle.” He got to his feet. “How is he?”
“Dead,” I said flatly. “And my mother is acting like the holy fucking ghost herself.”
He grimaced and reached for me, but I stepped back. “I need a drink.”
He held out the coffee to me, but I shook my head. Our eyes met. I don’t know what he saw in mine, because I have a hard time recalling what, at that moment, I was feeling. If I was feeling at all. It seems likely I was angry, but the memory is cloudy, like viewing something underwater.
“There’s a bar across the street,” he said.
“There always is, isn’t there?” came my oh-so-clever reply, and as I had done when we first met, I let him take me there.
It seemed fitting to toast my father’s passing with a gin and tonic, since that was his drink of choice. I’ve never been so spectacularly drunk. Shit-faced. Pissed. Trashed, wasted, sloshed. Or, as my father had been fond of saying, before the alcohol had robbed him even of his desire for conversation, extremely well lubricated.I remember walking into that bar, a nice enough little pub called The Clover Leaf. I don’t remember walking out. I think I recall a long walk down dark streets, and singing, but that might have been a dream. At any rate, the next thing I do remember with any clarity is the inside of my toilet bowel and the sound of blood rushing in my ears as I heaved.
It shouldn’t be difficult to imagine how a person such as me, a woman who barely feels comfortable around people when she is well, feels to have an audience when she is ill. That it was self-inflicted was no comfort, and in fact made my shame worse. I squirmed with it like the worms on the hooks my father had shown me how to bait. I cursed with it. I’m sure I frankly wallowed in it.
Dan, who could have left without a word of judgment from me, stayed the whole time. He brought me ginger ale to sip and saltine crackers, which I promptly vomited again. He held my hair back, then found a ponytail holder in my drawer to do it for me. He rinsed and wrung cool cloth after cool cloth to put on the back of my neck. Most of all, he sat, rubbing my back, while I wept or puked, or sometimes both at the same time.
There’s a reason why there are clichés. Because much of the time, they’re true. That it’s always darkest before dawn proved itself to me that night as I crouched on my knees and lost my guts over and over. While I lost my self-control.
He made a pillow for me from a towel and covered me with a sheet. I slept in the clothes I’d worn to the hospital. I woke with muscles aching, head pounding, stomach churning but staying in place. Dan slept next to me, propped between the tub and cabinet under the sink. His head had fallen forward. He snored.
He opened his eyes when I shifted. “Hey.”
I said nothing, afraid to open my mouth. Afraid to move too much. It felt as though my head were going to fall off, which might have been a blessing, considering how much it hurt.
Dan reached forward. “How are you feeling?”
I swallowed with a grimace at the taste of sickness. “I feel like shit.”
He looked sympathetic. “You drank a lot.”
“Yeah.”
I rubbed my eyes and brought my knees to my chest to rest my forehead on them. The tile floor hurt my butt and made it cold, but I couldn’t rouse myself to move. I was still bone tired.
And my father was still dead.
I waited for grief to strike me but I’d numbed myself so sufficiently the night before, I think I was incapable of feeling much of anything. Dan moved closer and rubbed my back.
“Why don’t you get in the shower? It might make you feel better.”
I lifted my head to look at him. “You stayed with me all night.”
He smiled and stroked a piece of hair off my forehead. I cringed to imagine how I must look, hair glued with sweat, rings under my eyes, skin pale. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Of course I did. I couldn’t leave you alone. I was worried about you.”
The concern in his eyes made my stomach twist a little more, but I didn’t feel like I had to throw up again. He cupped my cheek, then squeezed my shoulder and got to his feet.
“C’mon. I’ll run it for you.”
He made the water just the right temperature, not too hot or too cold. Like an ancient lady, I stood, grabbing the edge of the sink for support. The room spun and I closed my eyes against the sight, gritting my teeth to keep another set of gags from forcing my stomach out through my throat. Shoulders hunched, I shuffled across the tiled inches to the shower. He held my hand and arm to help me in.
Once in the shower, I got down on my knees again to let the water pound against my back. I put my forehead in my hands on the shower floor. This was a favorite position of mine, almost fetal, which allowed water to surround me as I rested. If I wanted, I could lie flat on my back with my legs slightly bent in this shower, which I’d had built oversize during the renovations. I’d slept this way, with hot water blocking out the world a
nd reminding me of what it might have been like cradled in the womb.
I might have slept now, so exhausted was I still, but the rattle of the curtain on its rings announced Dan’s presence. He got in beside me. I didn’t move over to give him any room.
“Elle, are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not acting fine.”
I turned my face to let water splash on it. “My father just died, Dan, and I went on a bender. How fine do you think I am?”
He rubbed my back. “Okay, I get it. Ask a stupid question—”
“Exactly.” I wasn’t up to verbal sparring.
He reached for my shower gel and a washcloth, and he started washing my back. It felt too good for me to make him stop. After a few moments he uncapped another bottle and began working shampoo through the thickness of my hair. It couldn’t have been easy, especially without me helping him, but he persevered, even rinsing out all the soap using the cup I’d set on the ledge for just that purpose. He added conditioner, working it through the strands and massaging my skull with strong fingers. He massaged my shoulders, too, and my back, the water assisting him like some sort of fancy spa treatment.
By the time the water started to run cold, I was as limp as a rag doll, and he helped me out of the water and dried me with such tender care I wanted to weep again. I didn’t. I only wanted to.
He wrapped me in my robe and dried my hair, then took me to my bedroom. He tucked us both into my bed beneath fresh sheets that smelled good. As soon as my head hit the pillow, my eyes closed. I heard the sound of his breathing, but in moments I was asleep.
There was to be a funeral, of course, and a gathering at the house, after. The perfect theater for my drama-queen mother to parade her grief in front of friends and family. I didn’t begrudge her, really. She’d never been a perfect mother or wife, and I had my issues with her, but she had been married to the man, after all. She’d chosen to stay with him. She’d earned her martyr’s crown.Considering my father’s body had enough alcohol in it to keep him pickled for a year, she nonetheless wasted no time in setting it all up. If she couldn’t wait to get him into the ground, I don’t suppose I can blame her. I understood that urgency, that sense of having to always get the worst out of the way so as to move on to something else. I’d learned it from her.
“When are you coming home?” Her voice stabbed me through the phone.
“I told you, Mother, tomorrow morning.”
“Are you bringing that man?”
I sighed. Light the color of butter streamed through my kitchen window. I traced the line it made on my table with the end of my pencil.
“I don’t know yet. Maybe.”
She was actually silent for a good thirty seconds. “Don’t expect me to let him sleep in your room with you. Just because Daddy’s gone doesn’t mean I’m going to allow you to slut around in my house.”
“I told you, Mother, I’m not staying overnight.”
I heard the snap of her lighter and the intake of breath. I imagined her drawing the smoke into her lungs and holding it, letting it stream from her nostrils in twin streams. She slurped, probably coffee, and I closed my eyes against the sudden sorrow that someone I knew so well should be someone who consistently brought me so much grief.
“The funeral’s at 10:00 a.m. People will come over right after. It will be late by the time it’s over. And you’ll be drunk.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’ll have a designated driver, isn’t it?” I tried not to let her accusation sting me, but of course it did. She knew just how to stick that needle between my ribs every time.
“Oh, your friend doesn’t drink?” The emphasis she put on the word friend was meant to be insulting, but I refused to take it that way.
“He does. We’ll be fine, Mother.”
She snorted, and I heard the tap-tap of her long nails on some hard surface. The side of her coffee mug, the one with the picture of Andrew on it. Her favorite.
“I’m going to need you,” she said after a moment, wheedling. “I’ll need you to go with me to Mass on Sunday.”
“I don’t go to Mass. You know that.”
“They won’t chase you out, Elspeth,” she said sharply. “It might do you some good to go to confession, you know. Wash yourself clean.”
My fingers tightened on the phone. “I don’t have to confess to sins that aren’t mine.”
She laughed. When I was younger, I had thought my mother’s laugh sounded like wind chimes. I thought she was a fairy queen, beautiful and perfect, her love unattainable. Her laugh hadn’t changed, but my perception of it had. Now it sounded like a rusted metal gate that refused to open all the way. The kind that would catch your clothes and tear them if you tried to squeeze through it.
“I’ll be there tomorrow morning.” I told her. “I’ll meet you at the church.”
“At least I know you’ll have a black dress,” she retorted. “Put on some makeup, for Christ’s sake. Tell me you won’t embarrass me.”
“No more than you will yourself,” I returned and had the guilt and satisfaction of hearing her sniffle.
She hung up on me without saying goodbye. I didn’t mind. I had another call to make, one I was dreading only a bit less than the one to my mother. I dialed the familiar number but got Chad’s voice mail.
His jovial message made me smile. “Hey, this is Chad. Stop wishing you were me and leave a message, already.”
After the beep, I spoke. “Chaddie, it’s Elle. Dad died. The funeral is Saturday. Tomorrow, Saturday. There’s going to be a wake. I think you should come home, Chad.”
I found speaking to his voice mail easier than telling him personally. The news of our father’s death slipped off my tongue with no more discomfort than if I’d been telling him about the loss of a pet or a stranger.
“She’s going to expect me to go to the cemetery, and I guess I’m going to have to go. I could really use you there, little brother.” My throat tightened, and I had to clear it several times before I could find my voice again. “She wants me to come home, and…I’m going to go. I think I should go, I mean, I think I have to, it’s the right thing to do. But I could use you there. I know you don’t want to come home, Chad, but this is your last chance to say goodbye to him. It might be good for you, too.”
I had no idea if his voice mail had a limit to the length of the messages it took, but so far I’d heard no beep to indicate it was cutting me off.
“I’m taking Dan with me,” I said into the receiver. “If you come home, I’d like you to meet him. Okay, please call me on my cell, I’ll be heading out to Mom’s tomorrow. The funeral’s going to be at St. Mary’s, and everyone’s going to Mom’s after that. I love you. Call me.”
I hung up, and though my phone rang a couple more times, it was never my brother returning my call.
“I’m not Catholic. Does it matter?” Dan eyed the front of the church with apprehension.“Not to me.” I took in a deep breath and adjusted the lapels of my black suit one more time. I hadn’t had to buy something new, my closet was filled with black and white, but I hadn’t worn this in a while and it had gotten loose. It was not so much that I cared how it fit for vanity’s sake, but because I knew the Dragon Queen would be eagle-eyeing me for loose threads, missing buttons, runs in my hose, worn soles on my shoes. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she held a color wheel up to my face and told me my shade of lipstick wasn’t in my palette.
“You look fine.” Dan rubbed my shoulder. “Are you ready to go in?”
“You should leave.” I turned to face him. My hands twisted my handkerchief into a ball and released it, over and over. “Go. You don’t need to sit through this. It’s going to be long and really boring.”
Dan’s brow creased. “Elle, I don’t mind. I want to be here for you.”
Faster my fingers twisted, as I looked from him to the church and the line of people slowly filing in. “Dan, I appreciate it, I really do, but I think maybe I should
do this alone. My mother—”
“Your mother needs you to be here,” he cut in smoothly. His hand rubbed my shoulder again, then slid down to take mine, hanky and all. “But you need someone to be here for you. You want me to stay.”
I couldn’t refute that any more than I could any of the other things he’d shown me I wanted. I sagged, shoulders hunching, and he put his arms around me. His embrace was matter-of-fact, nothing sensual about it. An embrace without lust. And he was right. I needed it, and I wanted it.
“Are you ready?” He asked after a few moments, his mouth moving against my hair. “It looks like everyone’s gone inside.”
I nodded against the front of his suit. Today he wore a somber black tie. I missed the trout and the hula dancers. I ran the soft material between my fingers, up and down, then let go.
“I’m ready.”
He put a finger to my chin to lift my gaze to his. “Elle, I’m here for you. Okay? If you feel like you need something, let me know.”
I nodded, voice stolen by emotion I wasn’t ready to face. Dan smiled. And, as I usually did when confronted with Dan’s smile, I smiled, too.
St. Mary’s is not a large church, but it is lovely. It had seen my first communion. My confirmation. It had heard my first confession and all the ones that had followed. I’d spent my childhood here under the gaze of the Blessed Virgin and, stepping through the heavy wooden doors to breathe in the scent of incense and holy water, I was transported.
Dan’s hand fit neatly under my elbow, guiding me. I dipped my fingers into the holy water font, the odd oily slickness of the water proof to me it was more than just water but something else, something divine. I pressed wet fingers to my forehead, the hollow of my throat, each shoulder, then rubbed them together until they dried.
Father McMahon had already begun, and more than one head turned as Dan and I walked down the aisle toward the first pew where my mother’s black-garbed figure awaited. It might have been sacrilege to imagine this was how Hansel and Gretel had felt walking through the forest toward the witch’s house, but I figured if the holy water font hadn’t started to boil when I dipped my fingers into it, God would surely overlook a little harmless imagination. Besides, I thought as I genuflected and made the sign of the cross, the analogy was faulty. Hansel and Gretel hadn’t known they were heading to their doom. I, on the other hand, had a pretty good idea about what awaited me.
