Ellipsis

by Kristy McGinnis

  She shook her head and pulled me into a hug, whispering in my ear, “Call me anytime, day or night.”

  Narek visited that evening, bringing Chinese food from our old favorite take out place. I was eating a little more, but it was still difficult to actually taste whatever was going down. He broke our comfortable silence, sharing the burden that was uniquely his. “I am so angry at myself. I always want to visit, but I always put it off. In a few months, I have enough money to travel, in a few months, I take time off work, in a few months, Nazani and the children don’t need me so much. Always an excuse! I would take it back now, any way possible. I would like even just one more day with him.”

  I could see the pain and guilt in his tear-filled eyes, and despite the previously impenetrable ice wall I’d erected around myself, it touched me in some small way. I felt a momentary urge to reach a hand out and pat his, but it was far too weak an urge to be acted on. For his entire life, Charlie had idolized his mysterious father, a man he’d met a handful of times after the age of three. He too would have done anything for just one day with him. If Charlie were still here, he’d keep growing and maturing and I am certain the day would have come that he would have resented this man and how absent he had truly been. At that moment, I felt resentful on Charlie’s behalf and that resentment warred with the unwelcome whispers of sympathy.

  Narek’s eyes dropped in shame, as if he were reading my mind. “I wish I could stay and take care of you, the way I didn’t when I was young and foolish. If I did not have children waiting for me, I would insist on that, actually. I cannot do this thing again, though; I cannot leave more children like I did Charlie.”

  “Oh, good god, Narek,” I burst out. “I don’t want you to leave your family! I want MY family back. I want my son here. You being here doesn’t fix that.”

  I glanced at the clock and reached for the ever-present pill bottle on the table. Narek’s hand shot out and covered mine. “I think you are taking too much; I think is not good for you at all.”

  I withdrew my hand quickly, as if a snake had touched it. I didn’t want to justify myself and my choices, and the easiest way to avoid that was to not take a pill. I looked up at him and shrugged my shoulders angrily. “Fine, I’m having a drink, though.”

  As I had always been able to do, I handed Narek a glass and convinced him to drink with me. I refused to be the slob who was falling apart while he got to play cool, restrained, rescuer. He was every bit as fucked up inside as me and we both knew it. When the vodka bottle was empty, I walked crookedly into the kitchen and rummaged through the cabinets. I was drunk, but not drunk enough. I found an old bottle of cheap champagne I’d received in a Christmas gift swap a few years back and popped that. Narek groaned when he heard the cork hit the ceiling, but he didn’t say no when I shoved a glassful of bubbles at him.

  “You’re leaving tomorrow still?” I asked, unable to decide if the prospect made me feel relieved or distressed.

  “No, in two days, I have an early flight so tomorrow will be my official goodbye. I must visit the grave before I leave seven days after burial. I must return to my job and family, but I am not through with mourning even then. I must mourn for forty days, and even without Charlie’s body, my family will mourn with me.”

  “Forty days?” I asked, confused. The alcohol was clouding my thinking. Was he saying after forty days he would be over it?

  “Is tradition. I will not shave until the time is over, and my family will join me in dark clothes. At fourteen days, we will host memorial at my home since we cannot all go to the grave.”

  The Narek I’d known had been almost hell-bent on shedding the auspices of Armenian culture. Part of what had drawn me to him was my perception of him as being exotic and different, but the truth was he strived in every way to be a “normal American college student” in those days. The rites he described now conflicted with the young man I’d known and they made me both uncomfortable and angry.

  “Charlie wasn’t Armenian you know, not in any way that mattered,” I said bitterly.

  He nodded and sipped his champagne again. “I am aware. And I take blame for that. I have told you I have changed, though. I am going to church again. I am raising my children to be true Armenians. I could not do that for Charlie in life, but I will in death.”

  I slammed my glass onto the table and stood angrily. I didn’t want to hear this, not any of it. I was so angry with him, many years of pent-up anger that I’d swallowed for Charlie’s sake, threatened to explode out of me. He stood too, refusing to be cowered by my glare.

  “Nell… let’s not do this now.”

  “Don’t do what? Tell the truth? Expose your fraud to the whole world?”

  His hands were on my shoulders and I was yelling, horrible, terrible, yet true things.

  “You left him! You left us! You broke every promise. You let me bring that beautiful boy into this terrible world, and you left me to raise him alone. You replaced us! We were all alone and he died. He died because you weren’t here to protect him!”

  He didn’t argue with me. He didn’t look away, even as his face twisted in anguish and tears rolled down his cheeks.

  And then I was crying too, and my tears weren’t angry tears; they were tears of loss. Loss of Charlie, loss of my youthful naivete about love, loss of dreams for the future, and perhaps most astonishing of all, loss of Narek.

  “I’ll never see you again after you leave tomorrow.”

  He shook his head in protest, but he was too drunk now to say the lie out loud.

  “Never again,” I repeated. He pulled me to him and when the kiss happened, it was desperate and hard enough to cause pain in my lip. Afterwards, after the kiss and the sex and the sobbing into each other’s arms, I watched him fall asleep and was thankful. Thankful he’d reminded me how to feel angry, and sad, and loved, and connected. I knew I’d go back to being someone in a painting and not a flesh and blood human being again after he left the next morning, but for a brief period I’d been a real woman again. One last chance to feel.

  With morning came a stabbing headache and a much more restrained goodbye. Narek stood awkwardly in the doorway and said, “If you need anything…”

  I nodded. “I know where to find you.”

  Still, he hesitated before walking away and finally, I had to say, “Go on, it’s time,” and then I watched him walk away for good.

  16

  My heart was locked away in a steel box, and my body was locked away in my small ranch style home. I’d become a hermit. I had spent the three weeks after everyone left holed up in my house, the only faces I saw were my grocery delivery person and the mailman. I avoided phone calls as well, deferring to voicemail and quick “I’m okay” responses via text to my family and Ben to ensure they wouldn’t rush in to check on me. The only person I really spoke to was Charlie. I’d taken to texting him regularly, throughout the day.

  I keep telling everyone I’m okay, but it’s a lie and we all know it. They accept the lie because it’s easier for them to go on with their lives that way.

  Your father texted today, I ignored it. I can’t absolve him of his guilt any more than I can absolve myself for not being there when you needed me...

  I found your baby book today, there’s a lock of hair in it… it was so silky and black, I smelled it, but it didn’t smell like you.

  I don’t think I believe in heaven, but I want to. I want to believe you are someplace happy. Mostly, I want to believe that if I die, I’ll see you again....

  I may have checked out from society, but society kept trying to find me. The stack of unopened cards, letters and bills on my kitchen table grew. I could afford to pay the bills; I was currently on paid sick status, although summer break was about to begin. Somehow though, the act of sitting down at my computer sounded like a task too taxing to bear. As for the cards and letters, I knew they’d be filled with empty words of sympathy that couldn’t have come close to touching the part of me that was locked in that steel
box. They, like everything else, felt pointless.

  More disturbing, were a few voicemail messages I’d received from a stranger. My number was unpublished, so someone, some mutual contact, must have passed it along. When I heard the messages, I’d immediately deleted them from my phone, wanting to forget the determined, strong voice I heard but not succeeding at that goal. I thought of it, of her, too much. I told Charlie about it.

  I’m glad I don’t answer calls, just got a voicemail from the mother of Number Three. She’s reaching out for mutual support she says. As if I am capable of offering anyone support…

  Why does that call bother me so much? Is it the fact she is so incredibly arrogant to think she is able to offer some magic salve or the fact she is so delusional to imagine I, myself, have that power?

  Phone rang with unknown number, tensed up, was it her? Finally braved the voicemail and no, it was the police department. They want me to pick up your belongings.

  Number Three’s mother left another message. She said Number Four is arranging a visit to the capital to discuss gun reform and hoped all of the affected families would go.

  Where is Number Two in all of this, I wonder.

  She called again. Am thinking of having my number changed to avoid that woman, but am afraid that might somehow delete all of our texts.

  The police call had prompted a whole new set of problems. I desperately wanted to get his belongings, but I also desperately wanted to not leave my house. If I didn’t pick them up immediately, would they destroy them somehow? Grudgingly, I dialed the phone number they had left. My hoarse, neglected voice, sounded like a stranger’s voice and it felt surreal to be discussing my dead child’s belongings over the phone, but in the end, I was reassured they would be held until I could pick them up. I wasn’t sure when that would be.

  With each passing day, I felt myself withdrawing more from the world outside my walls. I’d pulled the curtains tight and turned off the porch light. That life could so casually go on for everything and everyone on the outside was far too painful to consider. I preferred to pretend it had all stopped. That at this very moment, as I lay curled under Charlie’s old Star Wars blanket on the couch, with only my book to keep me company, so too had everyone else ceased to exist. Surely, they too were all holed up, dormant, in the darkness awaiting the moment I signaled, “Okay, we can all get up and go on now.”

  I made the mistake of turning on the local news. They were saying he attempted suicide in lockup. No one knows where he got the belt from...

  Ben dropped off your unfinished work. I refused to open the door and asked him to leave it on the porch. I was afraid to bring it inside, but more scared someone might come steal it so I finally grabbed it. The little fox in the unfinished field, it will always be unfinished…

  I was almost out of pills, but then I remembered the stash I’d put under the sink after your surgery. I now have 8 Vicodin in addition to my remaining 2 Xanax. I didn’t take one, I don’t want to waste it.

  I made it 31 days. On the 32nd day, I accepted that nothing would change. I knew I could get up and leave my house and go to work, and the empty pit inside me would persist. I could win the lottery, fall in love, go to Paris, whatever, and nothing would change. I would live with this feeling until the day I died, and I would indeed die one day. Every waking moment between this moment and that day, however many years away it was, would be meaningless and pointless pain. I was delaying that eventual end and, in the meantime, I was suffering needlessly.

  I burned my hand today on the stovetop. It was on purpose, I wanted to see if I could still feel. I did feel the sear, but I didn’t care.

  When I try to picture a future, I see only bleakness. There is no happy ending I can imagine that would make living through this hell worth it.

  I am going to take the pills.

  I poured a glass of cheap cabernet and sat down at our kitchen table with my pills and my notepad. I wrote a letter and explained where my accounts were, specified my parents should have the balances, thanked Ben for his help, and requested to be buried next to my son. Then I rest my hands, palms down, on the smooth wooden surface. We’d eaten so many meals on the cheap Ikea table, but I couldn’t remember what any of them tasted like. How strange that I’d stressed over clipping coupons and chasing sales while somehow ensuring whatever landed in the kitchen was deemed healthy enough to feed a growing boy. Why had I bothered with any of that? The money I’d saved had gone into his 529 plan and that was irrelevant now. Whatever nutrients I’d offered him had only gotten him to age thirteen; they too were irrelevant now. It was disconcerting, it occurred to me not only was the entire future moot but so was the past.

  I poured another glass and opened the bottle that housed the pills I’d saved. Lining the caplets up side by side, I studied them. They were so small and innocuous looking; tiny, white bullets. I remembered a line from a song, “just prayin’ to a God that I don’t believe in.” and wondered if I should pray. If there was still a God watching over this world of pain and misery, he hadn’t made his presence known to me in a very long time. If there was something more, though, some afterlife I couldn’t really envision, then I wanted to be there with Charlie.

  Finally, I said aloud, “I don’t believe in you and I don’t forgive you, but if you’re there, then let me be with my boy. You owe me that much.”

  One by one, I swallowed the pills, needing to refill my glass of wine when I was halfway through with the task. When they were all gone, I went into Charlie’s room and lay down on his bed, awaiting what happened next, but first, I sent Charlie one last message.

  I’ll be with you soon.

  I almost ignored the text alert from the nightstand, I was already feeling very sleepy and the room had begun to tilt. I glanced over at the lit screen though, the glow drew me in and without thinking, I reached for it.

  Mom call 911 now. It’s not time yet. Please…

  I blinked and tried to focus on the screen again, but it was blurry now. A whir of grey walls spun mercilessly around me as my stomach spasmed within me; whether it was a product of the pills or the text I’d just read, I wasn’t sure. The alert sounded again. I couldn’t read the text! My eyelids were so very heavy, I couldn’t keep them open. I grappled weakly in the darkness, pressing on the phone screen and then everything faded.

  17

  Everything fucking hurt. My head was pounding, my throat felt raw, my chest hurt, my stomach was cramping spasmodically even as waves of nausea crested over me. My hand felt bruised and raw under the taped gauze bandage that covered the IV port entry, and my muscles from my neck to the bottom of my back were screaming in protest. I could hear the beeps and whirs of various monitoring machines, but it hurt too badly to turn and look at them. At first, I only knew the pain, but then I suddenly remembered Charlie in a panic. Where was he? And then, a moment later, the delicate thread of amnesia floated away, and I remembered what had happened to Charlie.

  It was as if I’d lifted a large log from a dam where there’d been a faint trickle. There was now a rush of memory that couldn’t be stalled. Charlie, dead. The burial. My parents leaving. Narek walking away. The darkness of my house. The pills. The phone. The phone! I struggled to sit up because I needed to see the phone, needed to see if the text had been a drug-induced mirage, a Vicodin fueled hallucination. As I struggled to sit, a small clamp on my finger fell and the machine beside me gave a warning beep and suddenly, a nurse was there.

  “Ms. Sanger, it’s okay, you need to stay lying down,” she said kindly.

  “I need my phone,” I explained hoarsely. My throat was on fire. Why did it hurt so much to talk?

  “If the paramedics got it, it will be with your personal belongings, and I’ll check for you in a minute.” She fiddled with the machine beside me for a moment and then explained, “I’m getting the doctor and he can explain what’s happening now. I’ll also check to see if your phone is here.”

  I struggled to remember how I’d ended up in
this bed, but anything I could recall ended with reading that text. Mom call 911 now. It’s not time yet. Please… I needed to see it again. I knew that it was crazy to imagine it had been real. I knew some subconscious part of myself that still willed my body to live must have manifested itself on what was actually a blank screen. Knowing that didn’t make me any less desperate to confirm the truth with my own now-sober eyes.

  My thoughts were interrupted as the nurse returned with a short, middle-aged man.

  “Hello, I’m Doctor Patel. You’re at VCU Medical Center. Do you remember coming in last night?”

  I shook my head and rasped out, “I don’t remember anything but falling asleep.”

  “This is not surprising. The hydrocodone in the Vicodin you took is an opioid, you were unconscious through most of the event. The paramedics who brought you in used Narcan to counter it, and we were able to pump your stomach and administer IV acetadote for the acetaminophen poisoning. Medics were able to recover the empty Vicodin bottle, so we knew what we were working with and that helped. Vicodin presents a dual problem, though, while the hydrocodone portion presents the immediate threat, the acetaminophen presents a more long-term concern even with the acetadote. At this time, we are still running liver panels and you’ll need another blood gas test before we can move you from ICU. The good news is you are awake and alert, and that signals we got it out in time.”

  I felt tears well up in my eyes; what he described sounded so invasive and embarrassing. I imagined the medics into my messy house, going into Charlie’s room, tearing my clothes from my body to tend to it. They probably thought I was a junkie, someone who hadn’t once been a normal human being. Someone who hadn’t been a mother, a teacher. And now, this doctor was privy to all my body’s secrets. Then another thought occurred to me.