“Okay, Maggie,” I said bluntly. “You’ve got my ear. I’m listening. What does Lydia have to say?”
“She loves you so much,” Maggie said, unfazed at my rude tone, relieved to finally be unburdening herself of my little sister’s message. “And she walks every step of your path with you. She is so proud of you and so peaceful about the direction you are heading.”
Maggie told me about a vision she had the day of Lydia’s funeral. Maggie was there that day, with Drew. Her description was one of energies and darkness and light. A large black umbrella engulfed the service, she said; it was like this cosmic shroud that hung over Anna’s entire house. It was my mother’s suffering, the heaviest, blackest pain anyone could ever imagine. From the south, descending upon the funeral, Maggie noticed a matching dark umbrella. This was Lydia’s energy, Maggie explained. And Lydia was feeling so sad for what she had done, what she had to do. The two black clouds met and became one directly over the house. In Maggie’s vision the backyard became shrouded in black, a sort of cosmic darkness that formed a dome underneath which we all sat. But over the course of the service, that dome began to fill with the brightest white light that only pure love produces. Maggie said she could see myself and Anna and my father begin to release our own darkness and shine. And then she watched as my mother finally joined the funeral in progress, shining with her own white radiance. And Maggie said she watched as we all began to literally glow with the love and peace of knowing that although we all have this darkness now, to carry with us forever, Lydia’s was no longer there. We took it on for her. She relinquished it to us. Maggie said she sat in that backyard and watched us shine in the subconscious knowledge that Lydia’s pain was no longer heavy; that there was no more suffering for the girl we loved with every ounce of our being.
“She has peace,” Maggie said. “So give yourself permission to find your own. And keep your eyes and your heart wide open because she is trying so hard to make sure you see her. If you feel a tingle and you think something might be her . . . it is.”
“So what now?” I asked, tears streaming down my face. “What do I do now?”
Maggie didn’t hesitate.
“That’s completely up to you.”
THE TATTOOED LADY
My dad and I were playing catch in the front yard of my childhood house, two postcard Americans, father and son. It was a bright Sunday. Neighbors walked by and made quaint remarks.
Is spring here already?!
You guys going out for the Rockies this year?!
People always like seeing us out there. There’s something timeless about it. As they walked by I wondered how many of them knew our story. I wondered if any of them saw Lydia and Anna and me out there when we were kids, setting up lemonade stands and making snowmen. Did they see us trailing after our mom like baby ducks all those years, helping her unload groceries from the car? Did they know what happened to the little girl? Did any of them want to say anything? Offer their condolences? Were the ones who just kept their heads down searching for the words?
“You know what I’ve realized lately?” my dad asked me, both of our fastballs picking up velocity as our arms loosened up.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That I’m just so over the bullshit of all of it,” he said.
I asked him what he meant.
“The bullshit. The dark stuff, the bad stuff. Remembering the death itself and the trips to the hospital and the feelings of pain and guilt and all of that. I’m so sick of thinking about it. I could not be more done with all of that.”
I could relate. I had been writing this book. Thinking about her too much. Thinking about too much of the bad stuff.
“I just miss her,” he said.
It’s been six years since Lydia’s death, and we’re all trying so hard to grieve and to mourn and process everything we’ve been through. Some days are successes, others painful failures. It’s hard to even keep track.
I just miss her.
I do too. I miss everything about her.
“Three pushes,” my dad would often say when he was teasing Lydia. “Best at being born.”
That’s all it took, by my dad’s account anyway. Three pushes from my mom and out she came, wide-eyed, excitable, ready for the world. Like she couldn’t wait to join her family and get started. I think she lived her life that way. With that urgency.
The way she spoke. So fast. So intense. If you didn’t get the first word in with Lydia, forget about it. That was your only shot. If you did, Lydia was gracious. Happy to listen, happy to hear about everything you wanted to bring to the table and offer informed opinions and advice. But if Lydia took the reins of a conversation you were off full clip down whatever rabbit hole she was currently occupying. But it was endearing. She was such a gifted thinker, so nimble and eloquent, before you knew it you couldn’t help but agree that yes, Firefly is the most important television show of the early 2000s and anyone who doesn’t see that is not only fooling themselves but completely wasting your time.
She was an obsessive in the best sense of the word. I never saw my grandfather the art dealer in action. But his handiwork was the backdrop of my childhood. And it’s clear that the man was gifted; that he had far-ranging, eclectic tastes and truly appreciated the artists with whom he formed relationships. I imagine that he must have gotten lost in the art, consumed by it. It’s not hard to see that in Lydia. In the way she went about truly appreciating things. That’s why in spite of her crippling inability to harness her natural gifts, her circle was always dominated by musicians and artists. She got it. She understood. Often better than the artists themselves.
She fixated. It was unwavering.
I loved watching her fixate.
There were no casual interests for her. If something attracted her attention, she would follow it until there was literally nowhere else to turn. And if she could tell you about it then she was truly at her happiest. She loved sharing her obsessions, she loved turning you on to them: The Tick, the Misfits, the Coen Brothers. But even if her tastes weren’t cool, she pursued them wholesale. It did not matter the popular perception. If she liked it, that was all that mattered. She was unapologetic. I’ve never met someone so detached from cultural peer pressure. Hipsters withered at her feet. She was cynical, but never ironic. Her friend told me once when they were riding an escalator down to a parking garage after a movie, Lydia started doing high-kicks and singing “Magical Mister Mistoffelees” from Cats. She was in her twenties. Some guy watching her was so charmed by the whole thing he asked her out. Lydia and her friend gushed about it the whole way home. She was unapologetically herself.
I loved watching Lydia interact with animals.
She was a Doolittle. She whispered to them. She cooed. And they all responded. Lucy her hedgehog. Pipkin her rabbit. Penelope her greylag goose that she hatched in freshman biology as an experiment on imprinting. All the other geese were taken to some farm after the experiment. Imprinting be damned. Not Penelope. She stayed with us. Lived in our backyard, a real neighborhood attraction.
Lydia’s cat was her greatest joy: Sugar, an athletic, stray crow-assassin that we took in one Halloween night. Sugar was at her beck and call. Lydia would sing her name out and Sugar would come running. Even if she was outside, she’d shoot in through the cat door, track Lydia down, and nimbly jump into her arms. Lydia would boost Sugar up on her shoulders, front paws on one side, back paws on the other, her torso up against the back of Lydia’s head so she wore her like a high collar. They would walk around like that: Lydia with her Sugar-scarf. Sugar liked all of us; Sugar loved Lydia. When Sugar died Lydia got a tattoo on her right collarbone of Sugar’s paw print. A collarbone that has since been incinerated and sits with the rest of her, in a jar, in her closet.
My little sister.
I loved watching Lydia eat.
It was fascinating. She would latch on to one food and eat it obsessively for weeks on end. Sautéed spinach with lemon and garlic for three
weeks straight. MorningStar Farms Chik’n Nuggets for the next two. She loved Carmine’s on Penn, a family-style, high-end Italian place in Denver. Lydia would order take-out minestrone and baked ziti and a basket or two of their complimentary rolls, haul the ten-pound to-go order back to her house, and subsist on it for weeks: a stick-thin, hundred-pound glutton feasting in front of Buffy reruns like a mob boss. There was always a grocery store sheet cake in her fridge. Always. And of course all this was supplemented with a steady regimen of Goldfish crackers and mint Milanos, which she consumed with appalling frequency. Pepperidge Farm ought to build a statue of Lydia, somewhere out in the fields of Genevas and Pirouettes. So should Coca-Cola. Next to the statue of Jordan dunking. She drank three Cokes a day. Easily. Not Diet Coke, straight up Coca-Cola Classic, ole faithful, the fucking good stuff. And yet her teeth didn’t rot out of her head. And she didn’t have diabetes. It powered her, coursed through her body like oil in a truck. She could have been the poster child for Coke. You would have loved watching the satisfaction with which she would drink it. You would have loved to hear how powerfully she could belch afterward. My god. It was incredible.
I loved having Lydia love me.
There was no one more loyal. Her love was total and irrefutable. She held nothing back. Your happiness was hers. So was your suffering. Which she could not stand; which she would do anything to remedy. When we were kids we would play Oregon Trail on our Apple IIGS. But we could never pack our family into a covered wagon and head out west to meet our fate. We could never punch in John and Linda and Anna and Adam and Lydia as players at the beginning of the game and then head off down the trail. Because sickness and suffering awaited us, and Lydia couldn’t stand that, even fictionally. It was far easier on her to invent characters. She could handle Marcus dying of dysentery outside of Fort Kearney. Adam not so much. That’s how much she loved us.
That’s how I know she had to do what she did.
She loved us so goddamn much and she knew how much we loved her and how devastating it would be to us if she took herself out of the equation, yet she did it anyway. The thought of us hurting and suffering hurt her so badly and yet she still killed herself. She caused us hurt and suffering. That’s how I know there was no other choice for her. She knew she would destroy us but she had to do it anyway. Her pain was that great. And if that’s the choice she had to make to end the misery, then I have to choose to love her for that choice. She loved me unconditionally and I must do the same. We all must do the same.
Lydia was so much more than the broken, scared girl she was so often toward the end. She wasn’t always confused and sad and haunted. For most of her life, she glowed. She was this awesome original; this strange, funny, powerful force. There was no changing Lydia; it became a point of pride. There was no telling her how it was going to be for her, what she should or could be doing. And there was power in that. We all begrudgingly respected Lydia as immutable, whether we agreed with her or not. Right or wrong, we were impressed with her will, with the sheer force of her being. And we loved her for it. We love her for it still.
GOODNIGHT, MOON
My OCD has gotten better. It’s not nearly as crippling as it once was. Still, there are some rituals that remain, rituals that must be adhered to. Airplanes, for example. I have a regimen. I fly so much now, how could I not? I always have to buy a bottle of water for the flight. I always have to have gum. Both items must be stored away in my backpack for me to be able to get onboard. And when I do board the plane, as I’m transferring from the jet bridge onto the actual jet itself, I must touch the outside of the plane, I must feel the cool fuselage on my fingertips.
I always take a window seat toward the back, behind the wing. Somewhere I heard that that portion of the plane fares better in a crash. I have no idea if this is true or not, but I adhere to it anyway as a rule. Were someone to correct me on this notion, it wouldn’t matter. My routine would remain unchanged. It’s been established now. I leave my backpack in my window seat before I ever sit down, and I go to the bathroom before the plane takes off. I do this whether I need to or not. Who knows when I’ll be able to get back up and visit the restroom again? What if the guy in the middle seat falls asleep, trapping me? So I pee. I wash my hands. Then I head back to my seat. I check the emergency instructions laminate like Anna taught me and after that, once I finally settle in and we’re about to take off, I whisper the same, silent prayer that I’ve whispered for the past one hundred flights.
Dear Lord, please bless this vessel and all who dwell within it; please see it safely off the ground and safely back down to it.
I repeat this prayer before we land. To a god I cannot name and whom I often wonder if I even believe in. Doesn’t matter. The results are undeniable. Haven’t been in an airplane crash yet. Not one.
Knock on wood.
When I close down the house for the night, I have rituals as well. They’re not nearly as neurotic as the ones I had when I was a kid, with the fours and the nines on the TV and the counting of the bars of the bed frame. It’s a more casual routine, one probably familiar to many. The practical matters of turning in. I let the dogs outside to go to the bathroom. I go out with them, no matter how cold it is. I take a quiet moment for myself. I look up at the constellations: Orion, Cassiopeia. I remember how we don’t know what any of it means. Or why. And I’m okay with that. I have to be. On cold nights I watch my breath and listen to my silent neighborhood. Except on Sundays, when the coal trains pass through town, a dozen or so blocks away, blowing their horns in the distance.
I let the dogs back in and they run upstairs and climb into their doggy beds, next to my bed, where my wife lies, waiting for me. I remain downstairs, alone. My routine isn’t finished yet. I check all the dials on the oven, one, two, three, four. All turned to the “off” position. No fires tonight. I turn off the light by the back door. Then the kitchen lights. Then the ones in the living room. Finally, I turn off the light in the front entrance, a chandelier, six bulbs. They normally shut right off, but sometimes, they flicker. Or hiss, as if swelling in intensity, in wattage. Sometimes they don’t respond to the switch for several seconds, then they’ll go off on their own. I’ve seen them turn off, turn back on, then turn off themselves, without me ever having touched the switch except for that first time. I watch in those moments and I try to feel her. I try as hard as I can. The lights do their strange little dance and I watch them and marvel, silent and uncomprehending.
Hi, Lee.
EPILOGUE
It’s the summer a year before Lydia’s death, a cool, bright day. For the most part, she’s good. Happy. Funny. Beautiful. Haunted. Same old Lydia. She’s back in the city she grew up in and seems to be enjoying it as an adult. She’s vivid and alive.
Lydia’s fished my mother’s bike out of our parents’ garage, tuned it up and taken to riding around the city, day and night. She keeps hounding me to bike with her but I’m traveling more for comedy, the leisure time eludes me. One Sunday I finally cave. Lydia rides over to my house and then walks her bike alongside me the few blocks to Denver Health. I rent a bike from the bike-share kiosk outside the hospital, the same hospital that I’ll carry Lydia into a year from now. Just a few miles, I tell her. I’ve got stuff to do. We start off down the Cherry Creek bike path. It’s gorgeous out, golden; Denver always shows off in the summer. Quickly we’re at Confluence Park, where the city was settled. We cross the bridge over the confluence and bike northeast along the Platte River, toward Nebraska. Soon we’ve left the city behind us and are pushing into outer neighborhoods, then industrial ones, ones the gentrifiers haven’t yet reached, then prairie. Lydia asks if I want to turn back; if I need to get to whatever it is I need to get to. I tell her we’re good. Let’s just keep going. It’s too perfect out to stop.
We take a break across the Platte from Riverside Cemetery, home to the city’s founding fathers with their elaborate tombs and mausoleums and monuments—decaying statues of uniformed men on horseback. We stop because
we both notice something moving on the hillside, a half-dozen tiny, bobbing shapes. Focusing our eyes, we both realize they’re wild turkeys, a whole messy gang of them, ambling east toward the cemetery. Neither Lydia nor I have ever seen turkeys in Denver. We observe them in a sort of reverent silence, watching them as they crest the hill and disappear from view.
“When I die I want to be buried in that cemetery,” I tell Lydia apropos of nothing.
She nods solemnly. It’s settled.
We don’t turn back until we’ve reached Commerce City and the bike path fizzles out. We reverse course and retrace our ride, passing all the same sites, checking for the same turkeys by the cemetery, who have vanished. At the Confluence Park transfer from the Platte back to Cherry Creek, Lydia’s bike gets away from her for a moment. Riding behind her I watch as she drops her feet from the pedals and skids to an abrupt stop against a fence, the handlebars driving her fingers into the banister. She cries out.
“You okay?” I ask when I catch up. Her knuckles are bloody. I help her manipulate each finger, making sure none of them are broken. They’re not.
“I’m fine,” she says, shaking her hands and hopping back on her bike. “That was fucking stupid.”
She’s tough, my little sister, I think as we head back toward our neighborhood.
We all are.
When I check my rental bike back in to the kiosk, Lydia gets off her bike and walks with me back to my house, the same path we will walk a year from now, after her overdose, after we throw away the pills. But nothing is farther from our minds, not her impending demise, not the dark thoughts we’ve both struggled to fight off our whole lives, the ones I silenced, the ones she’s beginning to lose her battle with. None of that is there in that moment. We’re just a big brother and a little sister walking through our neighborhood, side by side, on a beautiful summer evening. We’ve got so many days left together.
Tragedy Plus Time Page 16
