Stories Beneath Our Skin

by Veronica Sloane

  Liam breathed out, Gene breathed out. Liam breathed in, and Gene didn't. The monitors started to chime, then wail, a wretched alarm clock that drowned out humming and coffee and the very dawn itself. A nurse charged in, shut it all down. A doctor with a clipboard followed, a time discussed and agreed upon.

  "Would you like a minute with the body?" someone asked, sweet and kind as could be though Liam couldn't have said if they were male or female, old or young.

  "No. Thank you." He got to his feet, let the cooling hand slide from his own.

  "We'll have him sent to the funeral home on record. They'll call you by this afternoon, I'm sure. It looks like the arrangements were all made, so you won't have to worry about anything. Is there someone that can take you home for now?"

  "No. Thank you."

  He walked past Gretchen arriving to work.

  "Goodbye." She reached for him and hugged him, her small hands grasping for his shoulders. "I'm so sorry."

  "Thank you." He kissed her on the cheek, untangled himself and homed in on his car. Gene's car. Liam's car was in California. Gene's car, but Liam's now. Like the house, all its spilling contents and the bank account carefully managed, though depleted from too many hospital bills.

  He drove home slowly, carefully. The sun heaved itself up over the horizon to spill harsh orange light in every direction. The temperature ticked upward. He broke instantly out in sweat while getting out of the car, and it poured off him as he stepped carefully on each stone square of the walkway.

  There was chattering when he went through the front door, Ace and Cole engaged in some kind of debate about Cheerios. He ghosted past them, went into his own bedroom, and lay down under Ginsberg's face. "The weight of the world is love" cast a shadow over him as he fell into an uneasy doze.

  The phone woke him, some unknown time later. Overheated and disoriented, he struggled out from under a blanket he hadn't drawn over himself. The phone stopped ringing, and there were footsteps coming down the hall. For a brief, swooping moment, Liam time traveled. He was small and scared. A nightmare had seized him out of sleep, and he knew he couldn't make a sound because his parents hated when he roused them in the middle of the night. He'd waited in bed for the fear to pass. Then the door had opened, and Gene had come through. Gene, and not the bulky shadow of Liam's father. Gene had given him a cold glass of water, talked to him about fly fishing, soothed him back to sleep.

  "It's the funeral parlor," Ace called him back to the present, handset wedged between shoulder and ear. "You want me to handle it? They just need a go ahead."

  "No. Thank you," Liam said, the only words coming easily to his lips. He reached out. Ace put the phone in his hand and an awkward kiss on his cheek.

  Gene had planned out his afterlife with Liam in the early days of the hospice, when he was still awake more often than asleep. They'd decided on a graveside service, an ecumenical minister who wouldn't care about Gene's tentative relationship with Christianity or Liam's bemused agnosticism. Simple. Easy. Gene hadn't wanted to be any trouble. Liam had resented it at the time, but now he was profoundly grateful. The idea of planning a shower right now made him want to crawl back into bed, let alone a funeral.

  Even the eulogy had already been written because Gene had wanted to hear it. "Not many people get a chance to be at their own funeral," he'd joked. Liam had brought in three drafts before they were both satisfied with it.

  "Tuesday at three," the professional crisp funeral parlor voice said over the phone. "I notice you've declined a viewing. Will there be a wake of any kind?"

  "Just the service." Liam closed his eyes against the afternoon brightness. "He didn't want a big fuss."

  "I understand."

  No, he probably didn't, but Liam wasn't going to argue the point. Instead, he sat down at Gene's scarred desk with an ancient address book and started making phone calls. The process was mechanical, too easy in some ways. Newspaper for the obituary, lawyer for notification, friends who could call other friends.

  And then there were the last two on the list. He stared down at the all too familiar numbers.

  "You okay?"

  Had Ace been here the entire time? Liam couldn't recall.

  "Yeah, I just... have to call my parents. Gene told me I had to tell them personally." Liam leaned back in the wooden chair, listened to the creak of it. "I don't mind my dad, but Mom..."

  "It can wait." Ace's hand was cool on the back of Liam's neck, steady and present.

  "I want to call her." Liam tilted his head forward, encouraging the tough. "That's the worst part. I want to call her and for her to be my mom and make it better. And she can't. Even if she was that kind of mother."

  "It can wait," Ace said again, pressed his thumb just to the side of Liam's spine, pushing away the growing tension. "Come have something to eat."

  The day got lost somewhere. Liam ate a few bites of something, picked up the phone when it rang and answered the same questions over and over until Ace pried it away from him and turned off the ringer.

  "It's important."

  "The messages will still be there in the morning. Come to bed."

  It was as if the summer of insomnia had caught up with him all at once. Liam fell asleep the second his head hit the pillow and didn't wake until nearly noon the next day. He showered, dressed, and drove over to the shop. Deb stared at him when he walked in, but said nothing as he went by her desk and into his studio, shutting the door behind him. No one sent him customers. He spent the afternoon drawing in thick markers: a forest, a lopsided tent, a brick house buried in roses, Ginsberg's wild words melting into tangles of color.

  The morning of the funeral saw him standing in the backyard. He wasn't thinking about anything in particular, wasn't even consciously avoiding the black suit bought months ago and finally laid out on his bed. There was a cup of tea in his hand, slowly going cool.

  "Okay," he rallied, watching a squirrel bunch itself small then take the leap from one branch to the next, leaping over the space where a young boy had pretended to camp out in the wild. "Okay."

  There was a crowd at the grave when Liam arrived. Dapper elderly men shook his hand solemnly, women with caked-on makeup gone blurry with tears grabbed him up for deceptively strong hugs. Stories rained down on him, most familiar, some new.

  "He was a good man," they told him over and over again as if he had never met Gene, as if he needed the reassurance. I know, he almost told them a dozen times, I know. Instead he just repeated empty thank you's until he thought he might go mad with it.

  The minister called everyone to attention.

  "We are gathered here today on the sad occasion..."

  Liam tuned him out. He stared at the casket, black gloss baking in the heat. The metal details gleamed ostentatiously. It had looked fine in the catalog, but it turned Liam's stomach now. Gene hadn't owned anything flashy. He'd preferred simplicity, a quiet life, even when he could afford other things. Maybe they should have chosen something plainer. What did it matter anyway? It was only a container that would never be seen again, sealed under the press of dirt and grass. Whatever made Gene himself had departed, been wiped from existence. Interring his flesh shouldn't make a difference one way or another.

  "Liam, would you like to say a few words?" the minister prompted.

  "Yes. Sorry." He stood, pulled the folded pages from his pocket and stared down at them. They didn't make sense laid out that way, jumbled tick marks. He looked up, running his eyes over the crowd to a buy a little time.

  Ace stood at attention in the back, black jeans, black button down, and dark sunglasses. Beside him, there was Goose, ragged and rangy in a long black coat, Deb in a smart tailored dress, and Frankie in full goth regalia down to a pair of black fingerless lace gloves. She waved a little at him, just two fingers, and the blood red line of her mouth looked unbearably solemn.

  "I don't know what I can tell you about Gene that you don't already know," Liam began, papers trembling in his hands, nearly forgotten. "
He was funny, kind, and the best father that I could have asked for. He taught me a lot of things. How to ride a bike, how to tell a story, and more importantly how to listen to one. But I think the best thing he taught me, taught so many people, was that family is so much more than the people who share your DNA.

  "We weren't related, me and him, except by the most tenuous definition. But he made me his son. He told me from the first day that I came to live with him that we'd been put together for a reason, and maybe it was God or fate or whatever, it didn't matter. We had to honor that. Respect it, even if no one else would.

  "I'll honor it for the rest of my life."

  After the coffin was lowered, other people's grief crashed over him in waves. He withstood it, anchored with one hand on a stranger's tombstone, thanking them for their words even though all he wanted was silence.

  "Hey." Ace cupped his elbow. "Come on."

  "I have to--"

  "You don't. Come on."

  He let Ace lead him away from the grave, from the milling crowd and into his car. They drove, not toward home but down the cluttered route towards the shop. Liam rested his forehead against the glass, neon flashing by. When the car stopped, he blindly followed Ace out into the late afternoon. They went into the darkened shop, closed sign flipped, traveled down the photo-strewn hall and up onto the roof.

  The cluster of deck chairs had sprouted a new white plastic arrival with Frankie tucked neatly in its arms and a rusted wrought iron coffee table supporting a mountain of food. Deb kicked out a metal chair.

  "Sit," she ordered, and Liam sat.

  "Eat," said Frankie, and handed him a plate full of creamed spinach, mashed potatoes, and a thick slab of meatloaf. It was too hot for the warmth of the day especially with his suit jacket still tight around his shoulders, but Liam ate every single bite and silently held his plate out for seconds.

  "A toast." Goose handed around bottles of beer, cracking off the caps with a quick snap of his wrist. "To Gene."

  "To Gene," they chorused, and Liam lifted his bottle up to join them.

  "When I was growing up," Frankie said, her voice gone soft and the creep of Louisiana slowing her vowels, "my grandmother would take me in the summers. I was already a strange sort of kid, but she never questioned anything. Let me wear her frilly aprons while we cooked. We'd spend hot afternoons like this at the community pool. She'd never swim, only sit in the sun with a romance book and talk with all the other women doing the same thing. They'd trade those books back and forth until the covers fell off, swear to God."

  "I have some of those." Deb picked at the label on her bottle until the edge furled up. "My sister likes them. When I knew I was going to be deployed, she wrapped me up a whole bunch to take with me. They were comforting, you know? Good reading when you were done with thinking. When we could get a phone call in, I'd read her the worst parts. The really terrible stuff. Make her laugh, and that made me laugh because she sounds like a goddamn braying donkey."

  "I've heard her do that." Goose took a long swallow from his bottle. "Best fucking thing. A good laugh is a sexy thing."

  "Yeah?" Frankie arched an eyebrow.

  "Sure." Goose smiled, loose and wide at her. "You know, that's how I wound up married. Olivia laughed with her whole body. I'd keep her up nights sometimes when I got her going good. It's the only thing I still miss about her. Used to think I'd carry that ache with me forever."

  "I remember when you two were nuts about each other." Ace rolled his eyes. "Back when you weighed a buck ten and wore those baggie rainbow pants to school every day."

  "Yeah, well, I remember a shrimpy guy with more anger than sense and an acoustic guitar hidden under his bed." Goose tossed a grape at Ace, whooping when Ace caught it neatly in his mouth. "Used to write those terrible songs."

  "What songs?" Liam had to ask, scooting his chair closer.

  "They were really very, very terrible." Ace snorted. "I only knew two chords and thought rhyming was the only way you could write anything. I think I traumatized our music teacher for life."

  They went on like that, telling each other stories and refreshing old memories. Liam listened, leaning in closer and closer until he slipped out of his chair altogether. He couldn't say how he wound up sitting on the ground, bracketed by Ace's legs. It was good though, his head rested on Ace's thigh and a hand stroking mindlessly through his hair.

  Somewhere along the way, his tie came undone and his suit jacket wound up around Frankie's shoulders when she began to shiver. Beer kept getting passed down to him until the line of empty bottles started at his hip and ended at the knee. For each one though, Ace forced some water onto him, saving him the hangover.

  The circle huddled closer as the last of the day's warmth fled. A gust of wind brought a dried leaf skittering across the roof. Liam closed his eyes and listened to the tangle of their voices. They talked long after the moon went up and the stars pushed through the haze.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Liam made the calls alone, in the dark. He waited until he was sure Ace was gone for the night and Cole was asleep, then tucked himself up on the couch under an afghan despite the last raw heat of the summer pounding at the windows.

  After a lot of hemming and hawing, he called his father first. It would take longer to get him on the phone, but the conversation would be far shorter. He listened to tinny distant hold music for a long time.

  "Hello?" His father sounded exhausted. Always did. Even before prison, as if constant pressure of wearing masks for others had worn thin the man beneath them.

  "Hi, Dad." Liam tucked his chin over his knee.

  "Hi," his father repeated, and silence hung between them.

  "So. Gene died," Liam said softly.

  "Sorry to hear it." His father sighed, a feathery sound over the handset. "He had a good set of golf clubs. You put those aside for me, okay?"

  "Yeah, okay." He almost laughed. "When do you picture playing that next game?"

  "Could be soon, could be." His father's voice wandered off. "Got an appeal coming down the line. Good behavior."

  "You stabbed a guy six months ago."

  "Self-defense," came the scoffing reply. "Be out soon, kiddo. Promise."

  "You always do." He tried to keep the bitterness out. He didn't want his father out, anyway. The man who had gone into prison had a rot in him that had only spread behind bars. Better he stay there. Safer for him and safer for the world at large. "Be careful."

  "You, too. You, too." The phone clicked off without a goodbye.

  "Right." Liam did laugh then, let himself get it out. It sounded too raw to his ears, stuttering to a ragged stop just before it turned hysterical.

  His mother was housed in a minimum-security prison. While they weren't gleeful about an off-hour phone call, no one took him to task. They didn't have a hold list, just a droning repeating message about regular call hours and visitation days. Liam phased it out. He hadn't visited since he'd left for college, despite Gene's encouragements.

  "Liam, baby?" His mother sounded breathless. Had she been sleeping? Had she run to the phone? He could picture her in the starched blue jumpsuit, her hair in its usual tight bun, holding the handset of the phone with white knuckles. "What's wrong?"

  "Hi, Mom." His eyes closed on their own accord. "It's... well. Gene passed on this week. And he wanted me to tell you."

  "Oh." She coughed once. "I'm sorry to hear that. I know he meant a lot to you."

  "He did."

  "Do you... will you be all right? Is there enough money? Can you stay in school?"

  "I'll be fine. There's some money, and I've got a bit from the scholarship. I'll have some debt, but nothing I can't work off in a few years."

  "That's good. That's... good. I wish--" She started then stopped. The silence of too many years fell between them.

  "Me, too," he said at last. "I wish that, too."

  "When I get out...can I visit you? I know you don't want to see me here, and I don't... well. But I'd like to s
ee you, baby. You've got to be all grown now."

  "I guess I am." He wondered what she'd think of his shaggy hair, the ragged tears of his nails. Would she fuss over him? Or would they meet, as he'd always pictured, at some cafe and have an awkward cup of coffee together like forgotten friends with too much damage between them to repair? "Six-three. Hope I'm done."

  "Your grandfather was tall. Your uncle, too. The real one. Dad's brother."

  "Gene was my real uncle," Liam said flatly. "Henry never even checked on me after. Don't even know where he is."

  "Liam, honestly. I was just making conversation."

  "Right. Sorry." He swallowed hard.

  "Henry had other things to do. Or maybe he's dead," she said dismissively. "Anyway, you should call more often, baby. I miss you."

  "Yeah." He rubbed the line between his eyebrows. "I know you do."

  "Well, don't you miss me?"

  "Sometimes."

  "What does that mean?" she snapped.

  "It means that I miss some things. I remember when you'd put your hand on my forehead when I had a fever or when we'd sing together in the kitchen. I remember you reading me Shakespeare instead of bedtime stories. So I miss you when I'm sick or when I read something in school that makes me think of you. That's what I mean."

  "What about the rest of the time?"

  "What do you want me to say?" The rage he usually held back so tightly poured out all at once. "What do you want from me, Mom? You left me on my own with nothing. No one. I was a kid, and I was scared, and my family disappeared all at once. I still have nightmares about the world disappearing from under my feet and just... fucking falling forever. The first time I visited, you told me it was my fault that you'd gotten caught, do you remember that? I was eight for God's sake. I thought everything... everything was on me. So no. I don't miss you every waking minute or whatever. If it's a good month, I don't think about you at all."

  "Liam," she panted out in one pained breath.

  "I'm not sorry." He went limp against the arm of the couch. "Because it wasn't my fault you did what you did. It's not my fault you went to jail, and I'm not fucking sorry about it. I won't take responsibility anymore."