When I Am Laid in Earth (Damnatio Memoriae Book 3)

by Laura Giebfried

  He gave a thoughtful frown and took a step closer so that he was standing on the topmost step where I sat.

  “That was quite a disagreement that you and Jack were having,” he said, his tone too neutral to give me an indication of what he was thinking.

  I pulled at my collar uncertainly.

  “Right. Sorry about the noise,” I said, realizing now how loudly our voices must have echoed down into the stairwell where his office was. “And – and the cursing,” I added, noting that our choice in language hadn't been the least bit appropriate for a church.

  “It's not the cursing that I was concerned about, Enim,” the priest said, turning his head to the side as he looked at me. “Though, I will say, the exchange took me by surprise.”

  I dropped my chin a bit, not sure how to respond. Father Taggart took another step down the stairs so that he could perch himself beside me.

  “You seemed quite adamant to leave,” he said. “Is Kipling not what you expected?”

  “It's not the town,” I said flatly.

  “No? What is it, then?”

  I glanced over at him, shifting in my spot as I did so. I had no desire to talk to a priest: it would surely be even worse than speaking to a psychiatrist.

  “It's just that I thought that coming up here would be different than it is.”

  Father Taggart studied me closely.

  “How so?”

  “I thought – I just thought that Jack and I would get along like we used to, and obviously we don't.”

  “You seemed to get on quite well up until now,” the priest suggested. “Everyone has disagreements.”

  I rolled my eyes. I hardly thought that what he had overheard between me and Jack could be qualified as a disagreement.

  “Things aren't the same as they used to be,” I said firmly. “We're not – we don't see things the same way anymore.”

  “Is that necessary in order to remain friends?”

  “If you're us it is,” I said. “We're just too different now.”

  Father Taggart sighed.

  “Forgive me, Enim, but from what I've heard of your friendship with Jack – which he's told me about in some detail, I might add – you two have always been rather different from one another.”

  I turned and stared off at the cemetery again, more inclined to look upon the rows of markers for the dead than I was to look at him.

  “Right,” I said. “But back then we used to balance each other out. Now we just – I don't know – throw each other off.”

  Father Taggart gave a quiet hum.

  “You know, I've known Jack for … three and a half years now, Enim,” he said quietly, “and in that time, I've learned quite a bit about him. Namely, I would say, that he's not one to open up to people or ask them for help. Seeing as he's done both with you, and that you – if I may say so – seem to share those same qualities, I find it odd that you would find it so easy to leave.”

  I turned back to him angrily. He suggested it as though he knew anything about the situation, or that he could somehow see into my soul to know me better than I did myself. But he couldn't see me, I knew, and certainly not my nonexistent soul, not even when he looked at me with his old, kind eyes that crossed in my mind like some horrible combination of Albertson and Beringer, and he couldn't see what I had seen, though if perhaps he had, then he would have known just how strongly the place pulled at me to rip me away.

  “Right, well, everyone leaves,” I said forcefully. “Maybe not immediately, but eventually – they all will.”

  “That's a rather cynical take on the world, Enim, if you don't mind me saying.”

  I shifted and pulled my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms about my legs in the hopes of retaining the last bit of warmth in my bones.

  “I'm not being cynical,” I said. “I'm just being reasonable.”

  “To say that everyone will leave one another in the end?”

  “Sure,” I said, giving him a halfhearted shrug. “Maybe not by walking out the door, but everyone leaves.”

  “That's your experience, you mean?”

  “No,” I said, my voice more snappish than I would have liked. I felt as though I was back at the treatment facility getting analyzed by one of the staff members as they decided what medication I should be on, and I wouldn't have been surprised if he had already prepared to tell me his own version of an antidote that would supposedly make me better. “No, it's not my experience – I just mean that – I just mean that no one's going to stick around forever. Everyone – everyone dies, Father.”

  He was silent for several moments.

  “Does dying equate to leaving?” he asked thoughtfully.

  “Sure.”

  “Are you? Only, I see one as a choice, and the other as an impossible act to avoid.” He leaned over to me and added in a gentler voice, “No one can live forever, Enim, though I'm sure that many of us would like to.”

  “Not all of us, though.”

  Father Taggart gave me a sorrowful frown.

  “No, not all of us. Though I hope, for your sake, that that statement stems from a desire to enter the afterlife, and not a lesser one.”

  I looked at him steadily.

  “There is no afterlife, Father Taggart.” I tightened my grip around my legs and locked my jaw upon saying it, certain but fearful all the same. “Besides, isn't that what that angel statue in the graveyard's supposed to mean? Memento Mori – remember to die?”

  The priest raised a hand and rubbed it against his forehead as he thought; his arm quivered a bit in the cold.

  “That's a literal translation, yes,” he said. “But, I'm afraid, when you put it like that, the meaning gets rather lost.”

  “So what's it supposed to mean, then?” I said, wondering where my error in the translation was. “Remember the dead? Because that's never seemed to do much good, either.”

  “No, no, the first one was correct,” he said. “It says 'remember to die.' But what it means, really, is 'remember that you must die' – and that, as you can see, gives it a new meaning. Remember that you will one day die, and so live your life very wisely.”

  The wind had blown somewhere over us, and a light sprinkling of snow came down from the nearby trees. As it flecked the tips of my boat shoes, I cautiously bit down on the tip of my tongue, unsure of what to say.

  “Mistakes can be corrected,” he went on after a moment, still urging me to apologize to Jack.

  I shook my head.

  “Not all of them.”

  “No, not all of them.” He paused and folded his hands together, and for an unpleasant moment I worried that he would begin praying for me. Then, however, he said, “But those mistakes can be forgiven.”

  He stood to leave, brushing the snow from his pants as he did so, and turned back to go inside with the offer that I could stay in the rectory for the night if I wanted to. As I listened to the softness of his tone and his careful, quiet compassion, something slid out of place in my ribcage and jabbed at my insides.

  “It's not God's forgiveness that I need,” I said hollowly.

  I walked into the town to get a room at the local inn, but upon arriving was told by the innkeeper that he couldn't house me. Though he cited that he had no rooms available, I rather thought that he had already heard from Mr. Perenna about my illness and had no desire to put me in one of his spare rooms. Walking back through the cemetery, I gave the gruesome angel statue a surly look as I thought about the conversation with the priest. He spoke with such understanding even though he harbored none of it, and though he supposed that I could be pardoned for the myriad of things that he wasn't even aware that I had done wrong, I knew that any forgiveness that I had ever hoped to receive was incapable of being spoken, locked beneath the ground where the people I wanted it from laid buried and silent in death.

  I crossed back into the churchyard and made my way down the hall to where the rectory was. It branched off into a small kitchen area and over to what I assumed was a
bedroom and bathroom further back. Taking a seat on the small couch, I curled up on top of it where the priest had left a wool blanket, evidently knowing that I would return, and though I was grateful to be out of the bitter cold, I resented the idea that he would assume that he was helping me and was glad to be leaving before I became a project of his just as Mr. Perenna had suggested that I would be.

  I waited until Jack had left for work the next day before going up to his room to collect my belongings and Mea. She was a bit wary of me after the outburst the night before, but eventually climbed out from beneath the bed and wagged her tail a few times before allowing me to pick her up. Carrying both her and my bag, I headed out through the town where one of the locals who was heading south had said that he could take me as far as the nearest bus station if I paid for the gas. As we slowly made our way down the road, Mea pawed at the window as the town faded into white behind us.

  Though it took me nearly a day and half in order to do so, as well as several bus rides that interchanged with taxi fares, I finally returned to Connecticut midway through the next day. My legs were cramped from sitting for so long, and my head was pounding from a lack of coffee, but it seemed better than calling Karl to come and collect me. I would tell him that I had returned later, and only after I had spoken to my father.

  When I knocked on the door of his Colonial house, his wife greeted me coldly.

  “So you've decided to come back after all, have you?”

  Mea was sitting at my feet sniffing at the welcome mat. I kept my eyes on her rather than Melinda.

  “Could I see my father, please?”

  I tried to keep my voice polite, though it turned out as something bordering on indifference instead. As I waited while Melinda chewed her tongue for a moment as though she was wishing to give a different reply than the one she was obliged to, I finally raised my eyes to meet hers.

  “He's resting,” she said, “but I suppose that that would be fine.”

  I left the dog in the living room and made my way upstairs. As I seldom frequented my father's new house other than to attend monthly dinners, I wasn't familiar with the layout. Walking quietly down the hallway, I looked in a few of the doors before finding the one that belonged to him.

  He was sitting up in the bed when I entered, his head propped up against a multitude of pillows and an array of medications and glasses of ice and water on the table at his side. He looked worn even though I had only seen him the week before as though I had been in Kipling for months rather than days, and the progression of loosened skin around his face and neck and the tiredness in his eyes struck me unexpectedly. It had taken my mother over a year to properly die; I wondered if he would be more or less unfortunate.

  “Enim, you came.”

  He sat up a bit straighter upon seeing me, and his lips pulled oddly as though he was trying to smile. He looked like something that had been created out of wax to impersonate a living thing, and I lingered by the door in fear of coming closer.

  “Yes.”

  “I wasn't sure … if you would.” It was far too difficult for him to speak, and the distance that I had placed between us was only worsening his ability as he tried to raise his voice. Forcing my feet up from the floor, I took another few steps forward so that I was perched at the foot of the bed.

  “Did … Is Karl here, too?”

  He glanced behind me as though his brother might be there, waiting for us to make our exchange before having one himself. A feeling of guilt trickled down into my stomach, but I swallowed and willed it away.

  “No. It's just me.”

  “Oh.”

  He looked both disappointed and relieved at the thought that at least one of us had seemingly taken his illness as an initiative to come, and I swallowed again, realizing that my own voice was becoming as hoarse and difficult to use as his.

  “I'm glad … that you're here.”

  “Right.”

  He had never had a soft voice, even when I had been younger and better suitable in his eyes, and hearing it was an odd combination of unwillingness and wishing that he was still able to reprimand me in his usual way. If he had not been sick, then he would have scolded me for the way that I had acted the week before and given me a firm lecture on how to behave in the future. But if he hadn't been sick, I reminded myself, then I wouldn't have been there at all.

  “You're … still angry with me,” he said.

  He could detect it in my tone even though it was the same flat one that I always used, and I gently smoothed the front of my sweater down as though it might counter what he thought that he knew. His eyes were growing dry and he was having trouble opening them all the way, and yet, for whatever reason, he seemed to think that he could finally see me after so many years of looking over me.

  “I don't … blame you,” he wheezed. “I wasn't … good to you.”

  “You were fine,” I said shortly, glancing at the door behind me to make sure that Melinda wasn't monitoring the conversation out of regard for her husband.

  “But you came,” he continued on, acting as though he hadn't heard me. “You came anyway. You were … always a good boy, Enim.”

  Be a good boy, Enim, and don't tell your father on me.

  I shut my eyes briefly and swallowed again, wishing that I could take a sip of the water that was sitting on his bedside table. As he wouldn't have said so if he hadn't been ill, then I rather thought that he shouldn't have said so at all.

  “Not always,” I said.

  “I wish … that I … had done things differently.”

  I pulled my hand up and scratched at my ear, not certain of how to respond.

  “Well, you didn't,” I said, wishing that I could somehow relate how wasteful it was for him to go back over it all now. “And if you had, then you wouldn't have met Melinda and her kids, so things turned out alright.” I paused. “Except for this part, that is.”

  He made a noise that I couldn't discern between a sigh and a lament and leaned his head back against the pillows.

  “I think you're right,” he said, speaking with his eyes still closed. I wished that he would open them: it seemed as though I was speaking to a corpse. “I think … that this is punishment … for what I did to you and your mother.”

  I pulled a piece of lint from his comforter and dropped it to the floor.

  “I never actually said that,” I told him, but he didn't seem to be listening.

  “I wouldn't have blamed you … if you hadn't come,” he said.

  I sighed.

  “I'm not angry with you, Dad,” I said dully, knowing that he would continue on in his sorrowful way if he didn't hear it directly.

  And I wasn't – or, at least, I wasn't for the reason that he was referring to. I had long gotten over the fact that he had left the way that he had, and if I tried hard enough, I could twist my more compassionate side into understanding how difficult it would have been for him to have stayed. And my mother was dead, so I couldn't have ever expected him to remain unmarried given that he had always wanted a standard, normal family to impress his life's meaning upon, and I wasn't reproachful of the one that he had chosen given that Melinda had done her best to be welcoming towards me and Ava had been far kinder than anything that I had done had ever called for.

  But now, in the small room with the light pouring white over our too-pale skin, I found myself sitting with the same sense of resentment that I had grown accustomed to associating with him as always, but this time it was for a reason that he couldn't have helped, though for all intents and purposes, I felt as though he should have tried. Because I wasn't angry with him for what had happened years ago, or even months ago, but I was angry with him at that moment for no better reason than the fact that, after waiting so long for him to come back into my life, he was just going to leave me again – and I was angry beyond belief that he was going to die.

  “I'm not worried about you,” he said, his head turned away a bit as though the light still bothered him from behind clos
ed lids. “I said so … last week, but I'm not. I know … you'll be alright.”

  My head was heavy, and for the briefest of moments I had the urge to lay down beside him on the bed. I wondered if he would put his arm around me if I did so in the way that I had wanted my mother to do when she had laid in the room at the end of the hallway, her body broken and mind more so, and as I thought of how I had longed for her to wake up again or give me any indication that she was still – even in part – there, the impulse passed.

  “Sure,” I said. “I'll be fine.”

  “Karl ... will take care of you.”

  “Right,” I said softly. A weight had pressed itself against my throat, and the air in the room was choking in a way that wouldn't allow me to breathe. “Well, I … I have to go now, Dad. I have to get back to … I can't stay.”

  “Oh.” He nodded, the movement slight, but a frown had formed over his eyes. “Of course.”

  “So I'll ...” I paused without continuing, uncertain of how I could finish the statement. I couldn't promise to return to see him again, but I couldn't say goodbye, either. My eyes fell on his hands where they had curled on top of his abdomen, but I pushed mine behind my back upon realizing that I had no desire to reach out and take them. “I'll see myself out.”

  I backed to the door and fumbled a bit to get it open; my hands were trembling in the cold.

  “Enim.”

  He spoke when I had already place a foot on the threshold, and though I couldn't bring myself to go back to his side, I turned my head towards him all the same.

  “Enim, I ...”

  The statement depleted in the air before it came, but it wasn't out of a shortness of breath or a weakness for speech. He couldn't say it: he had never been able to. One out of three, I thought, my face twitching at the thought of grading him on his progress: it was a start. But it was a finish, too, though it didn't seem as though it should have been.

  “I know, Dad,” I said, saving him the trouble. “I – I know.”

  I wandered back down the stairs numbly, neither feeling nor feeling for him, and my face was perfectly set by the time I reentered the living room and found Melinda.