Breathless

by Jessica Warman

  We take our time on the way to Hillsburg, stopping a lot to stretch our legs and take bathroom breaks, collecting a stack of postcards from the gas stations along I-84. (“Greetings from Beautiful Bridgeville!” “Hello from Historic Hannastown!”)

  “Oh my God,” she remarks as we’re coming down the valley into town, “I still can’t believe how much corn there is everywhere.”

  “Isn’t there corn in Connecticut?”

  She glares at me, puts her window down all the way, slides the top half of her body outside, and spreads her arms out, her legs balanced delicately against the door, and yells, “Corn!” over and over again, until I yank her inside by her shirt collar. We’re both giggling so hard that we have tears in our eyes.

  “Good old Hillsburg,” she says as we’re coming down the street my parents live on. “What a shithole. You’d better get out of here and never come back.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s kind of my plan.”

  “What do people do here?”

  “They get high and have sex.”

  “What else?”

  I pretend to think about it. “That’s it.”

  My parents are not home when we arrive, but all the doors are unlocked, the security system is off, the water is running in the kitchen sink. The whole house seems to be in motion. We look at each other.

  “Freaky,” Mazzie says, turning off the kitchen faucet.

  I shrug. “Well, my parents are freaks.”

  But there are other things: my parents’ cat is lying on the dining room table, shredding a bunch of lilies, the vase tipped on its side, water running in a crooked trickle over the edge and seeping into the Oriental rug like it just happened a few seconds before we walked through the door.

  Mazzie brushes past me, dropping her bags on the floor, heading back downstairs.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Bathroom. Turn some lights on, would you? This place is giving me the creeps.”

  While she’s gone I walk through the rooms, looking for anything else out of place. The piano—a baby grand that nobody in the family ever learned how to play—is closed, its lid covered with family photographs. At one point while he was home, last year I guess, Will cut himself from each of the photos and replaced them in their frames without him. So in each formal pose—though all of the pictures are more than a few years old, taken when we still got together and stood close enough to really touch each other—there is my mother, the Ghost, me, and a white outline of somebody else, in the center of our cluster, so that, in addition to his own removal from the scenes, he has removed slivers from the rest of us. It’s funny—the photos have clearly been dusted recently, and rearranged on the piano to allow for the placement of new photos from my parents’ trip to Greece last year—but nobody has bothered to correct Will’s work.

  Mazzie and I are eating pork rinds we picked up on the way and playing a cutthroat game of Uno in the basement when my parents get home a few hours later. We hear their footsteps before their voices; they seem to be taking their time upstairs, whispering to each other, and then one of them turns on the television, turning up the volume much louder than necessary—we hear bits and pieces of conversation from a rerun of The Tonight Show—while they remain upstairs, probably having a top secret conversation about something I couldn’t care less about. They’re like that. Everything always has to be just between the two of them.

  My mother comes downstairs, her shoes clackety-clacking against the floor. She rushes over to us, putting her arms around our shoulders and kissing us both on the tops of our heads.

  “Oh, girls! It’s so nice to see you both!” She musses our hair. “Look at you two, all grown up and ready for college. I can hardly believe it.” She glides her fingertips down the back of Mazzie’s head and dances them along the couch, over to me, leaning over to hug me from behind. “Hi, baby.” I get another kiss on the cheek. “It’s so good to have you home for once.” She peeks over my shoulder, looking at my cards. Her fingers are trembling against my face.

  She gets this way around Mazzie. It’s embarrassing the way she tries to appear maternal. Last time Mazzie came home with me, my mother—exhausted by the end of the weekend from her efforts to be nurturing—fell asleep drunk on the living room sofa with a book called Hot Monogamy open on her chest and her mouth wide open, her silver fillings reflecting light from the chandelier. Mazzie and I stuffed her mouth full of marshmallows and took Polaroid pictures of her, which we taped all over the house in discreet places (under the toilet lid in the guest bathroom, on the back of a box of Wheaties) for her to find after we’d gone back to school.

  “Hi, Mom. Hey, don’t look at my cards.”

  She heads right over to the bar and bends out of eyesight, reappearing with a bottle of wine cradled like an infant in her arms. “Well, I’m just exhausted. I’m going to fix myself a little drink.

  “You two didn’t spoil your appetites, did you?” she asks. “Your father and I brought home some Kung Pao chicken from the Wokery.”

  That’s another thing: every time Mazzie comes to visit, my parents assume that she wants to eat Chinese food, even though I’ve told them a hundred times that she’s Korean, even though she’s allergic to MSG. It’s almost like they’re unable to stop themselves. Ridiculous.

  My mother comes over to the couch with three glasses of red wine. “You girls can have some, too,” she whispers. “Don’t tell anybody.”

  I drink my wine very quickly while Mazzie leaves hers untouched after a polite sip. “Where were you earlier?” I ask. “You said you’d be here.”

  “Ohhh . . . we weren’t anywhere. We had a meeting to go to. It was last-minute.” She peers down at her wine, squinting as she swirls it in the glass. She extends her index finger and reaches carefully into the liquid, drawing her finger slowly back and forth, finally raising it to her eyes and nodding in satisfaction. I see a single, almost invisible piece of dust on the tip of her pointer finger.

  My parents go to bed early, around midnight. Mazzie and I have moved on to playing Monopoly. Once we’re certain they’re asleep, we dig in to their liquor collection and mix up a couple of whiskey sours, which we pretend to sip like good Southern women, counting our Monopoly money and exchanging subtle insults across the coffee table.

  After a while, I have the sense that somebody is still awake upstairs. It could be the cat, flopping around on the living room carpet, wrestling with bits of flowers, but it sure sounds like somebody pacing up and down the hall. I’m used to strange sounds in this house—it’s over a hundred years old, so it has to settle now and then. But there are all the little things from earlier this evening—the feeling that my parents had left in a rush, as though they were pulled away for some reason. I can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong.

  Mazzie and I pause in our game, listening to the noises upstairs, our eyes bloodshot and locked together.

  “I think it’s just the cat,” I whisper.

  Mazzie nods, slowly, and then her gaze shifts toward the stairs. I turn my head and see Priscilla pattering into the basement, her ears back, just as nervous as we are.

  “Hello?” I call.

  Priscilla jumps into Mazzie’s lap and begins licking her face. Mazzie hates cats. She swats her away, sending her a few feet across the room.

  “Go up there and see who it is,” she says.

  “I’m scared.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Don’t be a baby.”

  Eventually we agree on a compromise: we’ll stay downstairs and turn the television up loud enough to muffle any noises coming from upstairs. Mazzie falls asleep before I know it in the middle of a Quantum Leap rerun, her empty glass tilting toward the edge of the sofa, her mouth open and jaw relaxed against a goose-down pillow.

  I’m out of cigarettes, so all that’s left is to go on a search for the Ghost’s ultralights. Holding Priscilla like a baby, I tiptoe up the stairs to find his stash, which is probably on top of the refrigerator.

&nbs
p; There are voices coming from the second floor: my parents. It’s past two in the morning. The Ghost never stays up this late.

  For a second, as I’m heading toward their bedroom to eavesdrop, it occurs to me—what if they’re having sex? I stop and listen. I hear the murmur of my father’s voice, low and calm. It sounds like my mother is either laughing or crying.

  My parents do not have sex, I tell myself.

  Once I get within a few feet of their closed door, their voices pause. They hear me.

  Whispers. I squeeze my eyes shut.

  The Ghost appears in the doorway. I open my eyes and stare at him. “Why are you still dressed like that?”

  He’s still in his work clothes. He looks down at himself. All he says is, “Oh.”

  And my mother is still in her outfit from earlier, too; she’s even still wearing her earrings, which dangle close to her shoulders, her earlobes sagging. Her lipstick has been rubbed away so all that remains is a thin line of crimson liner around her mouth. Her hair is pulled into a sloppy ponytail. She sits on the mattress, her back against the headboard, and she appears to be half-drunk. Her mascara has smudged into raccoonish half moons below her eyes. She looks terrible.

  This is one of the first times I can remember ever seeing my mother so disorderly; even when she drinks too much, even when she spends long hours painting in her studio, she always has an almost eerie sense of calm to her.

  But I can’t forget how the two of them look tonight: my mother seems somehow stripped, her clothes too wrinkled for the amount of time she’s been wearing them, and she looks like she’s lost ten pounds since I last saw her just a few hours earlier. The Ghost looks the same as always, except his tie has been loosened, his collar unbuttoned to reveal his undershirt.

  I don’t think I’ve been in my parents’ room in years. Little memories are everywhere: my mother used to cut the Ghost’s old undershirts into long strips of cloth and wind my wet hair around them before bed, and I’d wake up with a mop of golden curls. We called them Daddy curls. My dad’s guitar case sits covered in dust in a corner. Before we moved to Hillsburg, he used to play for me and Will sometimes before bed. I remember his gentle singing voice, his callused fingers on the guitar strings, the way I’d stare at him while he played, his face the last thing I saw before I fell asleep. I was always so happy when he was home.

  “Katie. What are you doing up here?” My mother hardly seems to recognize me.

  “I heard voices. Why are you still awake?” Priscilla struggles in my arms, and I let her jump onto their bed.

  “Dad?” I glance back and forth between them. “What is it?”

  He sits down beside my mother, and they glance at each other, neither of them saying anything. They don’t have to talk in order to communicate.

  “Sit down, Kathryn,” my father says.

  I feel awkward sitting on their bed. My mother leans her head back and keeps her hands on Priscilla, who has curled up in her lap. She closes her eyes while my father begins to speak, and shortly after he begins she gets up and goes into their bathroom, shutting the door behind her. A few minutes later we hear the bath water running at full blast, as though she can’t bear to hear the story again.

  The Ghost can’t look at me while he talks.

  “We weren’t just out getting Chinese food earlier,” he says. “We were at the hospital.”

  “With Will? What’s the matter?”

  He clears his throat. He clutches a handful of the bedspread in his fist, his knuckles white. “Early this morning, an orderly at the hospital where Will is staying was killed. In your brother’s room. He was stomped to death by someone wearing a pair of heavy boots.” The Ghost finally looks at me. “They were your brother’s boots,” he says. “They have video surveillance of the orderly walking down the hall and going into the room. A nurse found him this morning. His body was in the bathtub.” The Ghost swallows hard. “There were shoeprints all over his neck and face. Will and his roommate were fast asleep, or at least pretending to be, when the nurse started screaming and woke them up. Neither of them will talk. They both claim to have slept through the night.” Then my dad adds—and I can almost detect a note of hope in his voice, his expression strong as he gazes past me—“They wear the same shoe size.”

  “Will couldn’t have done that,” I insist. “When has he ever hurt anybody? He’s never hurt anyone.”

  My father puts his arms around me. He starts to cry. “Oh, baby,” he says, the smells on him—cigarettes, maybe a little booze, fatigue, and sweat—curling into my nostrils and turning my stomach. “I love you.” He looks at me with cloudy eyes. Even in the shade of their bedroom, the lenses in his eyeglasses have darkened. Maybe it’s the heat from his face. “You’re just a little girl.”

  “Do they think he did it?”

  The Ghost covers his eyes. Tiny splashes sound from the bathroom. “I think so, honey.”

  “He couldn’t have—I have to talk to him. Daddy, I have to talk to him!” I feel a stab as I recall hanging up on those desperate collect calls last year.

  My father just stares.

  “Dad. Come on, you know he couldn’t have done anything to anybody.”

  “Kathryn—”

  “No. Nobody knows him better than I do. He wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  The Ghost shakes his head. “He did. He has. Remember, honey—last year. And the year before.”

  “He didn’t hurt that cat. It was an accident, I tried to tell you . . .”

  “But he hurt himself. He almost killed himself twice. He almost killed me.” The logic stops me, my mouth open, poised to speak. “Didn’t he?”

  When I don’t say anything, the Ghost continues. “Baby, listen.” He puts his arms around me. “He’s gone, honey. He isn’t here anymore. We’ve lost him.” He strokes the hair on my forehead, tries to calm me as I start to feel panic rising in my chest. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry we let you down. We tried so hard.”

  “I want to talk to him,” I whisper.

  “You can’t.”

  “I want to write him.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Yes, I can. I have to talk to him, there’s something I have to say to him—please tell him to write me. Please?”

  There’s a click, and the bathtub drain begins to gurgle behind the door.

  “Okay,” the Ghost says, reluctant. “I’ll tell him.”

  My mother has wrapped herself in a bathrobe. Without makeup, her face looks like worn paper, a million tiny blood vessels burst in a flush of deep red below her skin. She has removed her contacts and squints at us from behind a pair of glasses.

  My mother looks at my father and me in bed. It’s one of those high mattresses, two box springs beneath a California king. It’s so high that my mom needs a stepstool to climb in. Instead of getting into bed, she leans against the wall and slides toward the floor. She spreads her arms and says, “Come here, honey.”

  We sit on the floor together for a few minutes, the fan circling above our heads, repeating its aggressive swish, swish, swish.

  My mom takes a few long, deep breaths, which the Ghost has taught us to do when we need to calm down. She says, “He had a family.”

  “Who did?”

  “The man who was killed. He had a wife and parents and people who loved him.”

  The Ghost removes his glasses and begins to clean the lenses on a corner of his shirt. “Sweetie,” he says to my mother, “now listen to me—”

  “What about us?” I interrupt. “What about my brother? What about our family?”

  My mother grips my arm so tightly that I’ll have faint bruises the next day. “This is no family,” she says.

  “Honey . . .”

  “This is important,” she tells my father. “I want Katie to hear this.” She presses our foreheads together. She has the breath of someone who hasn’t slept. “I don’t know what we did wrong,” she says, “but I’m sorry. Katie, I am so sorry. We tried so hard. You kids were ever
ything to us.”

  “It’s okay, Mom.” We are all crying, and I’ve never been so thankful to have my mommy beside me.

  “No, it isn’t. Listen to me. I want to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  She pulls back. She continues to squeeze my arm. I try to wiggle away, but it’s no use. “Never have children,” she says. “Never have babies. It will break your heart.”

  Things slow down after that. I go downstairs to make myself a drink, digging through the fridge behind several half-empty varieties of all-natural peanut butter and a plastic bag full of rotting turnips until I come across a six-pack with four cans missing.

  I drink one right there in the kitchen, standing in front of the open refrigerator all by myself, and have just crumpled the can in my fist and tossed it into the sink, when my mother pushes through the swinging door, nearly hitting me in the face.

  She begins searching through the cabinet above the sink, where she keeps the medicine, paying no attention to me. The lights are off.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She goes to the fridge and opens the last beer for herself, holding the plastic six-rings for a moment, looking at it with uncertainty. She opens the cabinet under the sink and pulls out a plastic garbage bag, which is half-filled with something I can’t see. She opens the bag and places the six-rings inside, laying it carefully on top of the contents.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Oh, you don’t remember? You can make a hammock out of six-pack plastic.” She smiles at me. “You need five hundred of them.”

  “We never made a hammock.”