The Melting

by lize Spit

  We sat down beside Laurens in the third row of the nave, next to a statue of Mary with a weird look on her face—a broad smile that somehow still looked sad. Maybe the sculptor had started with the smile and changed his mind halfway.

  Laurens’s mom sat to our right, next to Tessie and me. Behind us was a whole row of teachers. Miss Emma had come back to town for the funeral, but she and her Black Pete sat off to the side, as far away from the other teachers as possible.

  Jolan was there too, somewhere. I hardly saw any of Jan’s other former classmates. Those who did come sat with their parents, hoping that this would somehow change things, that they’d no longer be the classmates who had collectively decided not to show up at Jan’s birthday party.

  Pim sat in the front between his parents. As the church bells rang, Jan’s casket was carried in by four young men. They were followed by a lady wearing a ridiculous black hat, black gloves and a tight skirt suit. Her gait, although not cheerful, clearly said: this is somebody else’s grief.

  Then came a wave of coughs. It started with an old man. His cough infected other people with the idea that coughing, like yawning, might bring some relief. It took a long time for the church to get quiet again.

  Jan’s casket was carefully placed on a special stand at the front of the church. The master of ceremonies motioned to the four pallbearers that they could go. They tried to look mournful, but I knew they were just going to go outside to smoke until they were called back in. It would’ve bothered me less if they’d just been honest about that.

  The priest stood up from his chair and lit the giant candles beside the altar. Everyone knew they were fake. Only the outsides were made of wax, inside was a little oil tank that could be refilled.

  The priest waited for it to get quiet.

  “Dear family of Jan, dear parishioners,” he began. “We are gathered here today in the presence of God to remember Jan and to say farewell. It is heartwarming to see how many of you have come.” He cleared his throat, the sound of which was amplified in the microphone, just like his voice. “The way I see it, people are like farmland. Occasionally they have to go quiet, lie fallow, so later they can move on.”

  He was doing his best to make the concept of mourning tangible to Pim’s family. I wondered whether he had written the text himself, whether Pim’s parents actually wanted all these bizarre metaphors and stories about reaping and sowing. Wasn’t the priest worried about ruining the only thing these people had left, their entire livelihood?

  I barely listened to what was being said. My eyes were on Pim, two rows in front of me.

  He was wearing a black shirt and shiny black pants—he looked like someone who still had something to lose. His father sat hunched beside him, wearing an old suit that exaggerated the broadness of his shoulders. On the back of his neck was an unruly patch of hair.

  This was the church we were baptized in, where we had our First Communion together, where we were confirmed. For this ceremony, there had been no rehearsals, but it all went off without a hitch. After about fifteen minutes, the offering basket went around for the first time. I didn’t have any change in my pocket.

  I didn’t want to cry. I knew that I was perfectly capable of not crying, that I could control my tears.

  Pim’s mother was asked to come forward. She unfolded her notes. She was wearing black pants that were narrower at the bottom than at the top and chunky heels about four centimeters high. Her notes were the only white thing in the entire church. She walked slowly, using her heels as picks.

  Was there a word for it, for what she had become? A word like orphan or widow, but for mothers who have lost a child. Would it help that there was no name for it, or would it only make the grief wild, harder to tame?

  Her voice sounded hoarse. Her hands were shaking. Before she even opened her mouth, I was in tears.

  I felt sorry, for Pim, for his father with the two broad shoulders that nobody dared to lay a hand on. Pim and his parents were all alone, and I was too far away to offer any comfort.

  Nobody in that church visited the farm as much as I did, nobody could imagine how horribly empty it was right now. Laurens wouldn’t think to do it, so I did. I thought extra-hard about the big white mound, the stalls where the cows were chained up to give birth, the camera connected to a screen in Pim’s parents’ bedroom so they could keep an eye on the pregnant mother from their bed.

  Pim’s mom read the sentences she’d prepared very slowly. She stuck to the script.

  As she spoke, I thought again of that camera, the view of the barn playing on the screen in their empty bedroom.

  Tessie started to cry too.

  I wasn’t surprised. She had bottled up a lot of grief over the last few days—Christmas was always hard.

  Laurens’s mom was stroking Tessie’s forearm, not mine. I didn’t know why she was crying for Jan, she hardly knew him. She didn’t go out to the farm. She’d never received compliments from him or kissed his pillow.

  I didn’t look at Tessie and didn’t offer her any comfort either. Laurens’s mom was already taking care of that. And maybe that was a good thing—Tessie needed to empty her tanks.

  Laurens’s mom gave us all a coin for the second collection. Laurens took the money and slipped it into his breast pocket.

  I was afraid I might burst out laughing. When it comes down to it, there’s not much difference between laughing and crying. It was like leaving home and coming back—it all happened in the same house.

  The funeral lasted about an hour. Pim didn’t read anything, though there was a folded piece of paper in his shirt pocket. He didn’t look at us, not even as the casket was being carried back out—the four pallbearers had switched sides to avoid uneven shoulders.

  “Yes! Sammies!” Laurens whispered as we entered the parish hall.

  I smiled, though it was a pretty depressing sight, the rows of little sandwiches. No matter what happens, people will always eat.

  We sat down at the front on the edge of the stage. From there, we had a good view of the entire hall. Other than the white napkins, there was very little decoration to speak of. Only neutral things that anybody in the parish could use, objects that were suitable for weddings, funerals and quiz nights: wicker baskets, lace tablecloths, chrome bowls, ashtrays, fire extinguishers, cake forks, sponsored coffee cups. The tables had been pushed to one side, in a long row. The chairs were stacked in such a way that they looked like they were sitting in each other’s laps.

  On the salmon-pink walls were faded landscape prints, the banners of local clubs, a few trinkets, a bow and arrow from the archery association, pictures of baptisms, communion parties, celebrations. There were a few kids wandering around who were under strict orders not to have too much fun.

  I kept watching Pim. He was accosted by people, some of them shook his hand. From where I was sitting, it almost looked like they were congratulating him for something.

  “Do you remember that time Jan’s clothes disappeared from the locker room during swim lessons?” Laurens asked, finishing off a sandwich. He shot the rubber band that had been wrapped around it into the room, trying to hit somebody in the back. There was a leaf of garden cress stuck between his front teeth.

  “No.” I didn’t want to have to think about it again, about Jan having to take the bus home from Verhoeven barefoot, wearing an oversized bathing suit borrowed from the lifeguard, with the wet print of his swimming trunks on it—he had refused to take a pair of underwear from the lost and found. Weeks later, his clothes and towel were found in the sinks of the men’s bathroom.

  “I’m going to go find another rubber band,” Laurens said. He jumped off the stage and waddled through the hall.

  As soon as Laurens was gone, Pim came over to me.

  “Eva,” he said. “Do you want to read this?”

  He handed me the folded note that had been in his breast pocket all day. My fingers were almost too weak to open the paper. I read through it, twice. The first time I scanned it q
uickly, to judge where it was going. It wasn’t what I was hoping for: a message from Jan to me, a declaration of love found in his bedroom, a poem with my name in it, nothing like that. It was just Pim’s handwriting, a few short sentences, starting with the words “Dear Jan.”

  I read the message Pim had written for his brother a second time.

  Suddenly, I thought back on that day we all went swimming together at the Pit and wondered whether Jan would’ve gone after me if his mom hadn’t put him in charge of bringing us home safely.

  “Nice,” I said. “Very appropriate.” My lungs contracted around the air I inhaled. A lump rose in my larynx, slowly but surely, climbing up with an ice pick.

  Pim put the note back in his pocket.

  We watched Laurens in silence. He had already passed on three cheese sandwiches. Clearly, he was looking for one with meat salad, though he kept insisting that he was only after the rubber bands.

  5:45 p.m.

  ClOCKS SHOULDN’T BE able to just stop. They’re supposed to keep the pace of human hearts.

  Hanging over the entrance to the milk house is an old Mickey Mouse clock, frozen in time. Mickey’s arms make up the minute and hour hands. He stands there stiffly, the big hand on eleven and the little hand on two, cheering unconvincingly. I step away from the ice block for a moment and tap on the glass in an attempt to nudge the second hand into motion. Nothing.

  The milk house used to be the heart of the farm, but no one comes in here now. The front area has been completely dismantled. For years, it housed a giant cooling tank for storing milk until the big tankers came to town. They showed up every few days, maneuvering down the narrow streets like the trucks in the Coca-Cola Christmas commercials, giving little kids something to stare at. It only took a few minutes for them to pump up all the milk—“to rob us” as Pim’s parents would say, because milk prices were only getting worse each year. Then the trucks took their load to the factories, where the milk was sterilized and bottled, and eventually found its way back to the Corner Store via wholesalers. Jolan once calculated that the odds that the milk on our breakfast table came from “our own cows” were about the same as the odds of finding a perler bead in the garden.

  Jan must have looked at this clock a lot. To stay on schedule, four cows had to be brought in, set up and hooked to the milking machines every ten minutes.

  The milk tank used to be right in the middle of the room, in the exact spot where I’m now setting up the ice block. There are still six holes where the humongous thing was bolted to the floor. To the right, behind the door, there used to be a kind of trench. It was a meter and a half deep and a couple meters wide, kind of like a manhole in a garage. From there, Jan and his father could attach the suction cups to the udders without having to get down on their knees every time.

  Nowadays, the trench contains six igloos. In five of the white domes are calves sleeping on a bed of straw, each one under its own heat source. Attached to the bars on the front of the cages are buckets full of yellowish milk. At the bottom of the bucket is a rubber teat that looks more like a phallus than a nipple. I take the one heat lamp that’s not being used. The calves don’t stir.

  I haul it back to the front of the milk house.

  Carefully, I step up on top of the block of ice. I toss the lamp’s cable over one of the roofbeams in one go and position the lamp so it hangs just above the ice. I do the same with the rope I just nicked from the sled. I make sure there’s enough left over so I can reach it.

  There are a lot of tools you can’t get in the city because nobody ever needs them; there are no neighbors to come borrow them. I was sure I’d find everything I needed here. But that Pim’s little boy would supply the rope—the odds of that were about the same as the odds of finding a hot bead in a garden.

  The music next door dies out. I hear voices in the yard, just a few meters away, there’s shouting and mooing, little kids who want to scare the cows by trying to talk to them.

  Was Pim’s son out there? What if they come in here, to have a look at the calves in the back? What if they find me here?

  The music starts again, it’s a country song, probably chosen by Laurens’s mom, or by somebody else from the Catholic women in agriculture organization who still dons their checkered shirt every week and hauls the portable CD player to the parish hall for line-dance practice.

  I give the rope a little tug. The knot’s tight enough. I call Tessie one last time. Her phone rings. Once, twice, three times.

  Just as I’m about to hang up, the phone already away from my ear, I hear a voice—not Tessie’s. Probably Nadine’s. I hang up immediately.

  When I heard that Tessie’s new foster mom was named Nadine, I looked her up on Facebook to see if she had any kids of her own. I went through all her photos. After that, I looked up where the term “foster mother” even came from. Who was being “fostered”—the mother or child? A lot of things can be fostered, including illusions, I thought, but then I met Nadine. She was kind and helpful. She ran a bakery and looked kind of like Laurens’s mom—round and independent. She just showed up too late with her good intentions.

  Tessie was placed with Nadine at her own request, and with my and Jolan’s approval. I had just moved to Brussels, and until then, I’d worried about her day and night. I’m letting her go, I thought, then she can stop wasting away in that group home where she lived for the first two years after she was hospitalized, where she only stayed because she didn’t want to go back to Mom and Dad in Bovenmeer. She could have dinner with another family, around another table, with normal brothers and sisters. At first, I found the thought of it reassuring. I was living in a new home myself, surrounded by other students. I could focus on my own life, make friends, be a bit more carefree. There was a force that stopped nagging at me for a little while. I assumed that Tessie was the reason I had always kept myself invisible—that I’d only wanted to be there for her.

  It wasn’t until a while later, when I started hearing from her less and less, that I began imagining what kind of bed she slept in, who she shared a room with, whether that person knew about the crocodile rule and ended with “Goodnight, Tes,” how the food was served, who her new friends were, how she was doing in high school, whether she, like me, would bike the many miles back and forth with somebody at her side, whether she too would run out of things to talk about with her friends, whether she would ever have the guts to turn her back on those people, whether there was someone who came up with little tricks to help her fall asleep, whether she could curl up with her foster mom on the couch in the evenings.

  Nadine said I was always welcome to visit. When I told her I didn’t want to be a fifth wheel, she didn’t really insist I wasn’t, which is why I never knocked on her door again.

  I struggled with it the most during the weekends when my roommates all went home. I wasn’t even a fifth wheel—I was the spare tire hidden at the bottom of the trunk that people hoped they’d never have to take out. I waited for Monday, for the time to pass, for the city to fill up again.

  After I’d finished my schoolwork, I started designing houses I could live in myself. With a bedroom for Tessie, an extra guest room for Jolan, room for a big kitchen. I made the design so minimalistic that it was almost impossible to create rituals in it.

  I decided to stop studying architecture right before the end of my second year, a few weeks after I got a phone call from Dad.

  He had tried to call me seven times during class without leaving a voicemail. After half an hour, he sent a message: “CALL BACK. URGENT. KIND REGARDS, KAREL DE WOLF, FINANCIAL ADVISOR DEXIA, ANTWERP.”

  Dad had never bothered to change the automatic signature on his messages after he retired. Every email and text message he sent us was proof that he had been useful elsewhere, that he had once been appreciated by other people, that he used to be fairly functional.

  “Eva. Nadia called, an hour ago,” he said when I called back. “Tessie, your sweet little sister, our sweet little girl, she tried
to kill herself.”

  By emphasizing our relationships to her, he was trying to make up for his years of disengagement.

  “Who’s Nadia?” I asked.

  “Nadine, I mean,” he said. “She found a bottle of drain cleaner under Tessie’s bed.”

  I thought about how Tessie would have swallowed the acid. How it would’ve burned through her mouth and lips on first contact. How it would have run down her esophagus, destroying everything in its path. I could feel my intestines burning.

  “Do you realize what this could’ve done to her?” he asked. “Do you need me to spell it out for you?”

  “How bad is she?” I ask.

  Dad pauses for a moment, to postpone the truth that would end the tragedy. I could hear Mom screeching things in the background.

  “Nadia got there in time,” he said.

  I took a deep breath in and blew the air out. I leaned against the wall in the school hallway. Around me, classmates were walking out of the classroom, off to have a drink together in the cafeteria.

  “Is Mom there? Put her on the phone.”

  “Okay, here she is.” I could hear the disappointment in his voice: he had lost my attention, I wanted Mom. It was this very sense of disillusionment that compelled him, time and again, to put his own need for drama over the well-being of others, over us, over the truth.

  He passed the phone to Mom.

  “Eva?”

  There was a tremor in her voice. I hung up without a word.

  Afterwards, I never asked Tessie about it because I didn’t know whether Dad had been telling the truth, and if she hadn’t really hidden a toxic substance in her room, I didn’t want to give her any ideas.

  The milk house feels empty, but that’s just because the corners of a room are always the darkest, and that’s exactly where all the unused stuff is kept—sink frames, disconnected water pipes, empty built-in cabinets. In the background was the incessant twang of country music.