by Mira Ptacin
Dad is in the kitchen studying for his board exams. He’s already consumed an entire tub of spumoni ice cream while reviewing his patients’ charts, and he’s just about to open a fresh bag of Oreos when the phone rings. It’s Mom calling to let him know she’s finishing up with work. She asks if he and Jules, “the boys,” could come lift all the heavy stuff. “Of course,” Dad tells her. “We’ll get you out of there faster,” he says.
At some point, I untangle from the college boy’s arms and look at the clock. 9:20. I tell him I have to go pee, which I don’t, but I’m bored with sucking face. I get up from the carpeted floor. I tell him I’ll be right back and step out of his dorm room and into the hallway. The neon lights are blinding, and ugly. Little morsels of crumbs and lint from the carpet stick to my jeans and I brush them off as I stroll to the bathroom.
Bobby, the checkout boy working the Dixie Mart register this Saturday night, sells the Chicago Tribune in front of St. Philip Church every Sunday morning. He plans on going to bed early tonight, right after he closes at ten o’clock. Bob’ll turn in early just like he does every Saturday night, because he’s got to be up on the corner of Cherry Street in time for the early church crowd. When he’s got another forty-five minutes or so before he closes up shop, Bobby tells two small children from the neighborhood that today their cans of pop are free. He tells them to just go home, quickly now. He wants them to leave because, at this point, Gordon is talking to anyone who’ll listen, slurring and swaying at the counter and making a scene. He’s getting scary. Thick, shiny bald head. Bulldog face. But then he pleads sweetly, almost singing to him, but Bobby still refuses to sell him any booze.
“Sir, I apologize. I cannot sell you any alcohol.” Deadpan, Bobby repeats the line again and again; he’s done it so many times to so many customers—the neighborhood winos and underage kids, or regular people drunk as balls, hoping to slip by, drink and drive. Bobby’s impersonal denial makes Gordon even more hot, and more desperate, and now Deborah has arrived, is in the store, flailing her arms around, making a racket, crying and fussing, acting all dramatic until Gordon finally caves, gives up and bangs out of the Dixie Mart, clomping back to his car. From behind the counter, framed by plastic cases of cigarettes and the glossy spools of lottery tickets, Bobby’s brows furrow while he watches Gordon rev up his engine and exit onto Emmett Street. Deb power walks to her car and does the same, leaving behind a bitter cloud of chalk and exhaust.
The boys arrive at RSVP restaurant; unload some dishes; stack chafers, China plates, and trays in the basement of the restaurant. They break down cardboard boxes next to the dumpster, mop, stack leftover dip and plastic-wrapped broccoli, peppers, carrots, and cherry tomatoes in the cooler, and kiss Mom on the cheek before heading to the video store.
“Do you want some dessert?” she asks her son, motioning at a fat triangle of white frosting.
“No thanks,” Julian responds. “I’m not hungry.”
“You should take some dessert,” she insists as he climbs into the car. “If you don’t take the dessert now,” Mom says, “you’ll regret it later.” But Jules leaves the dessert anyway.
I’m looking at myself close up in the mirror of the girls’ bathroom. A ring of irritated skin has formed a ruby circle around my mouth from making out with a fervent college boy, a former high school sweetheart who’s crazy about me but whom I’m not in love with anymore. My heart is still with Jeff. I find a hickey blossoming on my neck. Great.
I dig through my purse, look for gum. Contents: melted sticks of Doublemint, a tampon, two cigarettes, car keys, eleven dollars, one pager, and three Black & Milds. I calculate that I can smoke for about another year. I’ll quit before I turn nineteen. I don’t want to be one of those people, I think, those leather ladies with scratchy voices and hide so tanned that they look like a corpse. Those ladies in misery who spend Tuesdays in despondent church basement bingo halls, lonely and still smoking. Women who won’t admit they lost a grip on themselves when they turned eighteen, didn’t stop smoking, had a bunch of babies and still didn’t quit smoking. It’s too easy to get like that in this city. It’s too easy to get lazy, too easy to crash and burn. I’m going to do something big with myself, I think, stepping back from the sink. Get out of Battle Creek and do something big. I smooth the part on the top of my head, kick open the door to the carpeted hallway, saunter back to the boy’s dorm room.
Five blocks away from the Dixie Mart, a first-time expectant mother is sitting at her kitchen table, collecting scraps and bits of evidence for the case she’s putting together. She’s suing her doctor. She’s about four months pregnant and blaming the doctor, his instruments, his nurse, and the hospital for not being able to detect a heart murmur in her fetus. A mild heart murmur in an otherwise healthy baby. “If I’d known the baby would have problems, I would’ve stopped it,” she says. She blames the doctor, even though there was nothing he could’ve done.
“But the doc couldn’t have detected it, honey,” her mum tells her and suggests that her daughter consider dropping the whole thing (and she’s right, her girl won’t win) when the debate is interrupted by a long, high-pitched screech. An abrasive squeal, like a shrieking witch, followed by a sharp crash. Friction, the burning of rubber, and then the collision of metal—the cluster of noises is deafening. The car accident happens right outside their front door. In one of those cars, and half conscious, is the doctor the woman still sues anyway and loses her case against: my father.
Neighbors run outside, chasing the noise like the trails of a comet. This is what they see: Shards of aluminum and dented rims. Chains. Metal scraps. Two shattered windshields, windows broken into a million little pieces of glass, spread across the dark avenue like the swirling Milky Way. A black door, broken right off its hinge. From above, two cars form a T-bone shape in the middle of the East Avenue and Pitman intersection. Smoke rising. Sirens. Ambulance. Paramedics. More and more people gather, and everyone stares at the scene like it’s a bonfire.
In my mind’s eye, I can see Deborah, pathetic and heaving, crouched on a concrete curb. And just down from her, underneath a willow tree, there’s Gordon, pacing back and forth like a caged cheetah. For him, it was an invisible stop sign. He wasn’t that drunk, it was invisible, and he will swear this to be the case forever. And even further down, in a black Nissan, my father is trapped inside. He has a broken collarbone, a few broken ribs. He is holding his son, rocking him like a little baby. His son was a boy. Fourteen years old. Just a boy, and suddenly, he’s asleep. A lamp overturned in the rain.
Two blocks away, my mother is doing the last of the paperwork and splitting up tips when she hears the sirens. For a second, she reflects on the sound of ambulances and fire trucks in the late night and what their sirens mean—a wailing song like that on a Saturday night is never a happy song, never good news. Just for an instant, she pauses, feels sorry for those people, then goes back to counting tips and paying her employees. Twenty minutes later, her telephone rings.
His dorm room is locked. I knock three times, ba-bum-bum, and the bolt clicks. The door opens slowly and the college boy is standing there, all Vincent Price-like, holding the door back open with his shirt on now; he’s fully dressed and all grim, just standing there.
“Ha, ha, I say, lemme in,” but he doesn’t move or step aside, just looks back at me. “What?” I ask. “Do I have something on my face?” In the dark cubby behind him, two more sets of eyes stare at me—stiff, dream-like, iridescent eyes like the opossums in our woods. One set is his roommate’s, and the other set is my girlfriend’s. She steps forward into the glare of the fluorescent light, reaches out.
“It’s for you,” she says and passes me a beige cordless phone.
It’s not my mother. It’s Mom’s friend Claire. Claire’s voice is like sugar. Sweetie, your mother needs you to come home, she says. And Mom, tired of Claire pussyfooting around the awful truth, takes the phone from her and delivers h
alf of it.
“Come. Home. Now. Someone is dead.”
We leave.
We drive back home, not knowing. I chain smoke the remainder of what’s left: two cigarettes and three Black & Milds, and try to figure out what the hell my mother was talking about. It’s raining very lightly, and with each drag of tobacco, I attempt to realize who is dead, try justifying in my mind which of my three family members it could most sensibly be, in terms of God’s way, in terms of fate. Sabina? Dad? Julian? Someone has just died. My senses are numb. I think it might be my father. In the grand pattern of life, would it make more sense to have it happen to Dad? What about Sabina? I try to solve this like it’s a mathematical problem, not yet incorporating into the equation what the outcome would’ve been if I hadn’t left home tonight. If I had left five minutes later, three minutes, one minute. If I’d went with my gut and stayed home, rather than listen to that false voice in my head telling me what I should be doing, what I’m supposed to do. With each drag, the car gets closer to Battle Creek, and with each drag, we move closer to the prolonged answer. I smoke, and my friend drives us through forty minutes of bitter silence. Finally, the Buick pulls into the turnabout of Battle Creek Community Hospital, where my father often works. I get out of the car, float through the sliding glass door of the emergency room entrance, the fluorescent lights lighting my way until I find someone I know.
The two geese have gotten what they came for. I watch as they hobble away from the casket, increasing their speed, flapping their wings and jumping, hoping to get airborne. They want to migrate south; that’s where the food and warmth is.
A boy is dead. Fourteen years old, lean and lanky. His face was uncommon and his eyes were blue and set wide apart, just as they are said to be in imaginative people, just like they are in statues of Joan of Arc. This boy’s sand-colored hair was always tousled, except today it is combed. Pomaded, combed, and neatly parted, I imagine, but can’t say for sure because I haven’t looked. I didn’t and I won’t. He didn’t dress himself today, either, in what I’ve been told is a checkered, brown shirt. He didn’t lay out his clothes last night, or tidy up his room the other day. Three days ago, he didn’t know he should’ve been getting rid of the stacks of Playboy that he and his buddies hid in a shoe box in the tool shed, or telling us the combination to his gym locker, or saying all his last goodbyes.
Everyone else came here wearing all things black—black pants, black dresses, black coats, black patent-leather shoes, black umbrellas, all things dark except for the football team in their mesh jerseys that match the color of the grass they’re standing on; grass as turned up and tumbled as the turf from their football game last week. The boy’s last football game. Looking at them, I imagine that the question How could God let this happen? has blossomed inside their young minds, will continue to bud and bloom for the next days and weeks and months and on from there. They’ll have no idea how to behave, what to do, what kind of expressions to bear. There are different ways. The football team will hold vigils, plant a dogwood tree, pin ribbons to their shirts and dedicate a yearbook page, but the question will remain unanswered. Their eyes are red and soggy—everyone’s are—and hopeless looks are exchanged in such a way that it doesn’t really seem to do much good standing here waiting to figure out what to do when things fall apart.
The past few days feel as if everyone has been underwater, idly swaying like the slow limbs of a sea anemone. The life that surrounds us has been muffled. We are woozy, and our reaction time is slow. We talk in a strange staccato rhythm like the snapping claws of crabs. Green bean casserole. Green bean casserole. Cheese plate, cheese plate. Spaghetti. Iceberg lettuce. Italian dressing. Brownies.
I will never forget the smells that woke me last Sunday morning. Alone and fully clothed in Mom and Dad’s otherwise empty bed, I floated into the kitchen, where I was immediately pounced upon by a flock of women with tepid condolences and baked goods. Comfort foods. Those are the real scent of death to the living. If every single one of those dishes broke into pieces and pierced me like a hundred daggers, I’m not certain I would have even felt any pain. I’m numb and not sure I will feel anything anymore. The only thing that is certain is death. That and the fact that everybody always wants something sweet. We all want something sweet.
The priest clears his throat.
“Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel; quia visitavit et fecit redemptionem plebi suæ.”
Ten years ago, this man gave me my First Holy Communion.
I can’t remember the last time we were gathered all together on purpose, the whole cast of family, friends, and those from our elementary days: the gym teacher, the violin teacher, the carpool drivers; even the football team’s girlfriends are here. We are stitched together, we are gathered here on purpose, standing in a circle declawed of hope, rich with a smell that reminds me of earthworms, and of the first day of school.
“Et erexit cornu salutis nobis, in domo David pueri sui.”
Everything is damp and foggy and in the center of our circle there is a boy who is dead and I don’t know who he is. I know the name; but the face and the timeless body are not his, and does anybody here even understand Latin?
“Grant this mercy, O Lord, we beseech Thee, to Thy servant departed, that he may not receive in punishment the requital of his deeds who in desire did keep Thy will.”
This funeral, this sentimental gesture, one that stands for a last goodbye, is a silly gesture. This is not natural. This is not our last goodbye. We missed our chance for that. Nonetheless, I’m supposed to be doing it. It’s what we do, right? And in this conventional gesture, I’m trying to hold onto the moment, freeze time, because it seems less insane than the idea of going backward in time. Trying again. Starting over. A redo. But time keeps moving forward, further away from that night, away from the moment I had that choice, and there’s nothing I can do about it except live better. Live for two.
“And as the true faith here united him to the company of the faithful, so may Thy mercy unite him above to the choirs of angels, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
They say we are supposed to cherish these moments, honor these last goodbyes, hold them in our hearts forever, but really. Really, I just cannot get into this. This is not for me. So I have a choice: I can sit quietly with my hands under my seat and watch this robed man toss his prayers over the poor youth.
“Ut sine timore, de manu inimicorum liberati, serviamus illi. In sanctitate et iustitia coram ipso, omnibus diebus nostris.”
Or, I can shout, freeze this last time we’ll all be together, run over to the boy, and hold on until we are both ready to let go.
“As we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
But I don’t shout. I can’t freeze time. I can’t go backward. Instead, I sit quietly. I don’t move. I’ve already done enough. Why did I leave the house? I should’ve stayed home.
The casket is in its final resting place, and Mom and Dad watch as strangers drop handfuls of dirt and pinches of grass into the open chamber. I see my mother. Mom’s lipstick. Always on, always red. She has lost the boy she had saved. She has lost her son, yet she remains composed. She says nothing, she is silent. Sturdy, like a thick tree. I finger the moist Kleenex in my pocket. It tears and rolls into tiny balls that stay in my pocket for years to come.
“May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen.”
A collective paralysis locks together every spectator. Convention, an unseen agreement that this is okay, that we accept that this will stand for the last goodbye: our black clothes, this concrete vault, these words led by this man. A coffin: polished oak, sealed, smooth, firm, and eternal. A boy is dead, and that is that.
My focus shifts to the back of their heads—Mom, Sabina, Dad. Then my cousin Marek, my brother’s best friend. Beyond my arms, I see our aunts and un
cles, our other cousins, kids from Julian’s class, Bean’s class. I see my best friend, Amanda. I see my entire orchestra class, our conductor. I see that relentless newscaster standing behind the chef from Mom’s restaurant. I see the receptionists from Dad’s office. I see the boy I was kissing Saturday night. I see Ken, Dad’s friend from the seminary.
I lean forward and whisper in Bean’s hair, “Kenny G. is here.” Sabina’s head whips around, makes a sharp right turn. “Where?” she mouths, and instructs me to get him, so I turn around, walk toward the rear of the immense group of mourners, through all the bodies toward Ken’s. I grip his arm and tug him up toward the front to where my family is, near the casket.
If we asked him to, Ken could lead the whole memorial service. He knows how to perform mass. My dad and Ken were students together at the Saint Mary of the Lake Minor Seminary in Chicago almost all the way to priesthood, but they both dropped out. Ken’s a lawyer now, practices in Champaign. Every single Sunday he plays the organ in all three services at his church.
After Dad and Ken quit the seminary, they started losing touch, eventually dropped off each other’s radar entirely. Then, maybe twenty years later, Ken found Dad and started visiting him, started visiting our family. Totally out of the blue. Soon he was visiting almost once a month. Soon we started to expect him for the holidays. Mom practically adopted him. He has become part of our family. We love Ken.
Jules loved Ken.
I give Ken my spot, the chair in between Sabina and Dad. It’s a green chair, covered in some jade, velvety blanket to protect it from the rain. A blanket probably from the storage room in the funeral home’s garage. We are the only people with the velvet chairs, the privileged. As if the velvet chair quietly announces that those who sit in it are the people who loved the dead person the most. Dad’s arm is in a sling and the expression on his face looks very confused. Dad’s been whispering his words all week. Ken sets his hand on Dad’s shoulder. It’s not your fault.
