I had been placed on hold by some woman who sounded like she’d been taking orders to replace the glass broken in household disputes all day long. I tapped my finger against the thin sheets of the Yellow Pages and hummed to myself, because there was no hold music.
Hy-Lo was still in the bathroom and I heard him curse to himself over the sound of the medicine cabinet opening and closing.
The woman came back on and told me she would be with me in another minute.
The street that bottoms out at the Dip is a quiet one that’s rarely used because it’s broken and crumbling. It tears away at car bottoms and snaps axles like shinbones. No one expected a semi to come barreling down the street.
They said Malcolm didn’t even see it coming. His arms were outstretched like the wings of an eagle when the shiny silver grill of the truck struck him. He was sent flying just like an eagle over the pavement, but his heart stopped in midair and he lost the gracefulness of flight and landed fifty yards away in a crumpled heap on his side.
I had heard the bellowing howl of the horn right as the driver laid a too-late-hand on its rubber blackness. The sound grabbed my attention, just for a moment, before the woman came back on the line: “I’m so sorry for the wait—this day has been murder with a capital M! Now, how can I help you?”
They wouldn’t be able to come before tomorrow. I would have to make up a lie or hope Delia wouldn’t notice the missing glass. I thought again about the horn and another sounded off in the distance. Semis traveled Linden Boulevard at all hours of the day and honked their horns at the small cars that got in their way. It was a familiar sound, like crickets on a summer night.
Hy-Lo was in his room. The house was quiet except for the flapping sound of Malcolm’s light green windbreaker as it swayed lazily back and forth on the clothesline. It was spring and it was one of those days where the chill in the air came in shreds and slithers between the gliding warmth of the season. It was one of those days.
The bell rang and broke the silence. I looked at the clock; it was almost seven and Delia had still not arrived. Two police officers stood outside our door. I noticed their nightsticks first and then the nine millimeters at their waists.
They removed their hats and their eyes moved between my face and the broken step of the stoop.
“Yes,” I said and leaned my head on the wooden frame of the door. I was tired and thought someone had called them to report the disturbance.
They shifted their weight between their feet and chanced a glance at my bare legs and the faded denim shorts I wore. “Mrs. Lowe?” they asked solemnly.
I didn’t hear the Mrs. or maybe I was too used to taking care of everything to think of myself as anything other than Mrs., but I said yes anyway and waited.
“Um …” the one with the freckles and harelip started, but a car backfired, causing both men to grip their guns.
“Yes,” I said again, annoyed now.
“You have a son … um …” The black leather book, flipping pages, flipping pages. Our information always seemed to be in the back. “Malcolm Lowe?”
“Uh-huh,” I said and noticed the police cruiser for the first time. Was that Devon sitting in the backseat?
“May we come in?” the officer with the curly brown hair and thick eyebrows asked.
“No … What happened … where’s Malcolm?” I said, straining my neck to make sure it was Devon. What had they done? Where was Malcolm?
They weren’t giving me any answers, just looking at my legs and my bare feet as I stepped out of the doorway and onto the cold concrete of the stoop. My hands were on my hips and I tippy-toed to look over their shoulders to make sure it was Devon, and it was, but he wasn’t grinning. Something was wrong.
I looked into the faces of the officers and I knew this was something I couldn’t fix before Delia got home.
“Malcolm was struck down by a tractor trailer today on Jenkins Avenue—”
“What hospital is he in?” I asked as I turned around to run back into the house to get some money, my sneakers, and Malcolm’s light green windbreaker.
“Well, he …”
I didn’t even hear the officer’s words, I just heard Malcolm’s picture slip lopsided against the wall and I knew.
We go to court every day; even Glenna takes a leave of absence from her job to sit between Delia and me. She holds our hands through the proceedings and lets Delia cry on her shoulder. I don’t cry. I can’t cry. All I am is stone and stone sheds no tears.
On the long wooden bench there is a space where Mable and Sam should be. I touch the mellow-colored wood and think of them every day before the judge bangs his gavel and court begins. They’re not there because they don’t know Malcolm’s been in the ground for three weeks and will have been in the ground for ten before Delia finally tells them.
We smell like gardenias, the three of us. The smell clings to our skin and hair, and even though we shower twice a day, the scent remains. It would have been lilies if we had a choice. If we had money to make a choice. But we didn’t and someone had sent gardenias to the funeral home by mistake. The deliveryman wouldn’t take them back, even though the name on the delivery slip said Mike’s Auto Body and not Cane’s Funeral Home.
“De address—it’s de right one, yes?” the man with skin the color of night and teeth bright as day kept saying over and over to the receptionist.
“Yes, but this is a funeral home, not an auto body shop,” she repeated for the fourth time in exasperation.
“I leave here, yes? You settle with dem later, yes?” he said and pushed the delivery slip into his pocket. He tipped his yellow, green, and black baseball cap that said AFRICA across the top in large black letters and then jumped into his beat-up station wagon and sped away.
That’s how we got the gardenias, us and everybody else who had a family member laid out in one of the six rooms.
To me hate always smelled like vodka and cigarettes, but now hate also smelled like gardenias and sounded like a million mothers weeping and was the color and texture of a green silk scarf with black polka dots.
Hy-Lo doesn’t come. Not once. Not to the funeral home, graveyard, or courtroom. I think he tried to, almost every day, but before he could shower the bottle called him. And after he combed and patted his hair into place, the bottle called to him again, and when he ran his thumb over the scuff on the end of his shiny black shoe the bottle called him again.
Better he just stays and finishes the bottle and not have to deal with the pain at all. So Hy-Lo doesn’t come.
I think he tried. I’m sure he tried.
Every day I sat there trying to listen to what was being said, but my hearing was clouded by the vision of Malcolm laid out on a slab of steel, a white sheet thrown over his body, covering the naked and bruised parts but allowing us to see his face. On that day I think he looks more like Delia than at any other time in his life.
Half the time I can’t see the judge or the people around us because I can’t stop the movie that’s playing in my head. Over and over again I see Delia’s legs giving way at the sight of her dead son. I see her head hitting the wall and spewing blood everywhere. I hear her moaning and crying and I see the blood running into her eyes and her shaking hands and they remind me of how Hy-Lo’s hands shake on Sunday afternoon when the liquor stores are closed and he has nothing left over from Saturday.
On the last day when the judge bangs his gavel down hard, my hearing comes back and I feel like I’m floating near the ceiling looking down on me. People are moving out of the courtroom. Some come over and say things. Their words sound garbled, but I can tell from the way their lips move and the dewiness of their eyes that their words are sweet and sometimes pitiful. Others lightly touch my hand and Delia’s; many grab hold of our shoulders and squeeze. I just nod my head and say thank you.
“Where’s your dad at, Kenzie?” “Delia, where Hy-Lo at?” they ask after they make sure they sweep the courtroom good with their eyes. Make sure they don’t miss him
sitting at the back or by the window.
No one cares if he’s there or not because they know how Hy-Lo is and they’ve already figured out that he had something to do with it, but they’re not sure how and what exactly.
They don’t care but they put that emotion aside for the moment and ask anyway because it’s polite to inquire, and besides, they need something juicy to discuss over their meat loaf and mashed potato dinner that evening.
“He’s home,” we reply in unison like some off-key duet.
They didn’t need to hear any more, their imagination would take it from there. They’d shake their heads and maybe offer a sympathetic “tsk, tsk” and move on.
The driver of the truck is the last to approach; he is a small man like my father, but Mexican. He has written my family six letters, each more apologetic than the last. Delia unclasps her hands and spreads her arms out at her sides, like a bird protecting her nestling, as if his closeness alone could take the life of her remaining child.
His hands are cuffed behind him and there is a court officer on either side of him. His eyes are brimmed red and there is scarlet present beneath his bronze skin. I am familiar with those brimming eyes and the tint in his skin. Even without reading the police report, I knew that this man shared many things with my father.
“I’m sorry,” he says. I’ve read it twenty times in his letters, in between the names of his children and the description of his sod house in the small fishing village of Tulum where he was born and raised. The village where his aging parents remain, eating and surviving on the small amounts of money he is able to send them after he feeds and clothes his family here in the States.
I look at him, but he is not looking at me. His eyes are focused on the six small faces that stare back at him: his wife Maria, four daughters—Diana, Isabelle, Estela, Jacqueline— and a newborn son, Enrique. I know their names well. He has written them in his letters just as many times as he has written, I am sorry.
But now I hear him say it and his voice is filled with sorrow and I decide that his brimming red eyes are not from rum, vodka, or tequila, but from the salty tears that streak his face.
His wife falls to his feet, wailing and hanging on to his ankles. Her hair is straight and black and for some reason reminds me of the tire marks her husband’s truck left in the street at the bottom of the Dip. And then I think of Malcolm; this man left him there too.
She drops to the floor, screaming and crying. The children follow and they fight to embrace him. Some cling to his waist, others grab hold of his neck. The smaller ones lose out and have to settle for his legs and ankles.
They sob in unison, “O Dios mío! Por favor!”
He cries with them and his words are a sorrowful mixture of Spanish and English that says he’s sorry and that it was just a small bottle, Es pequeño. But they still take him away to serve his three-to-five though not less than two.
Hy-Lo drinks small bottles too, I think to myself, and we all get up to leave.
* * *
The lights went off and then on again in our apartment, and what little connection Delia and I had left disappeared with the sudden darkness.
She grabbed up her pack of cigarettes, wiped at the salty tracks beneath her eyes, and pulled herself up from the couch, stepping over my feet, careful not to touch me as she moved slowly past me and toward her bedroom.
Chapter Eighteen
I went to him that night even as the temperature dropped below zero and the streets went slick with black ice. The weather report called for snow, sleet, and freezing rain. But I went anyway, like some sick junkie needing a fix.
I ran most of the way after jumping off the bus, cutting between moving cars and dashing out against the light, running like something was chasing me.
I’ve got a death wish, but it’s not mine and I need to cancel the request I put in when I was five, so I run like a madwoman through the streets and nearly knock down an elderly couple. I trip over a dog, but I get up and keep going until my chest feels like it will bust open and my heart threatens to give up on me.
I can’t stop because I need to see the bottoms of his feet, because he can’t answer my questions about the wind so I need to see his feet. I need to know for myself that it’s true.
It’s late when I finally get there and visiting hours have been over since eight. I make it past the guard because he’s too wrapped up in the conversation he’s having with the big-breasted nurse. She has long wavy hair and his eyes never leave her chest or the glossy strands that bounce around her face as she laughs at his corny jokes. His eyes never leave her, not for a moment, so he never sees me sneak past and up the stairs.
I take the steps in twos and by the second landing I’m taking them in threes.
“Miss!” I hear someone scream out at my back when I make it to Hy-Lo’s floor. “Miss, visiting hours are over!” The voice screams without even considering the sleeping patients or the scared and dying ones who can’t take loud noises or things that scream and go bump in the night.
I don’t stop, I just keep moving until I come to the doorway of his room. I don’t stop until I’m sitting down next to his bed, so close now that I can hear the very faint sound of his breathing and see the slight rise and fall of his chest.
I remove my hat, scarf, and gloves, take off my jacket, and after a moment or two, I pull off my sweatshirt and sit there in my faded jeans and a thin blue T-shirt with tiny pink bears dancing across my chest. I don’t shiver at all; in fact there are small beads of sweat on my arms, across my forehead, and forming on the space above my lip. There’s warmth moving through and around me.
I move closer still and my knees knock into the steel leg of the cabinet that holds all of his monitors; the red and green lights blink spastic for a second at the impact and then hold steady again.
“Daddy,” I whisper in his ear and place my hand on his cheek. The skin is soft there, soft like a newborn’s. “Daddy,” I say again and run my hand over his forehead.
He doesn’t look as bad as he did all of these weeks I’ve been coming. He’s got some color in his cheeks and he looks like he just might open his eyes and sit up. That scares the shit out of me because I know the suffering is over for him, the pain has left his body and his life is about to follow.
There’s not much time left, so I lean in and tell him, “I know why you were who you were. It’s the same reason why I am who I am.”
I don’t really understand it myself, and some small part of me begs me to reconsider my forgiveness. But I don’t look at it as forgiving, I look at it as a fresh coat of paint, and then I hear the voice inside me say: You’ve got to let go in order to move forward.
Even so, I look at him hard trying to see the animal that lurked inside of him for so many years. I strain and twist my head this way and that to see if it has hidden itself in the folds of skin. But there is no beast there, just Hyman Lowe, the father I would never know.
I see a shadow cross the wall and I know the end is near. “Daddy,” I say again and take his hand in mine and try to pull him away from God’s grip. I want so much to take back those times I wished him dead. “Daddy,” I hear myself cry and I can’t believe my face is wet and I can’t believe it hurts so bad inside. “Daddy!” I’m screaming now, because his hand is going cold in mine and the movement in his chest is slowing down.
Dianne found us beneath the steady stream of blue and white morning light that filtered through the window. My head resting on his chest, his arm thrown across my back.
I was sleeping, he was gone.
“Kenzie, Kenzie,” she called softly and shook me.
I looked up at her and smiled. Dianne smiled back, but her smile was sad.
“Kenzie …” she started and then stopped to compose herself. She ran her hands across the clean white of her uniform and glanced out the window toward the sky before looking back at me and beginning again. “Kenzie … your dad … he’s … gone.”
I knew that he was. I watched h
im slip away. I saw him take his last breath and felt his hand squeeze my shoulder goodbye.
My eyes filled with tears and I straightened myself up and looked down into the sallow face of what Hy-Lo’s soul had left behind.
“I need to see his feet,” I said.
“What?” Dianne responded as she wiped at her eyes.
“I need to see his feet,” I said again.
Dianne undid the sheet and pulled it up to reveal Hy-Lo’s feet. They were black and shriveled; the soles were yellow and covered with large star-shaped scars.
I sighed and wiped at the fresh tears that formed in my eyes.
“Do you need more time?” Dianne asked.
“No, no,” I said and shook my head.
She slowly covered his feet and then pulled the sheet up over his face. “I’m sorry, Kenzie.” She put her hand gently on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry too,” I said and felt the hole near my heart shrink. “I’m sorry for both of us,” I said and looked out into the warm December day.
The Warmest December Page 23
