Postcards from a Dead Girl

by Kirk Farber

  I decide it’s time for a test. What the hell. It’s no therapy-grade peat mud, but it will do. I toss in a few dozen spadefuls of loose dirt, roll out the garden hose, turn on the water, and let it flow into the hole. I watch the sky as I wait. The dark shadow of an owl glides silently overhead. Maybe I’m being visited by my spirit animal as I live this secret, nocturnal life: my predatory backyard existence. I try to spot the owl’s location in the trees but something else catches my eye. It’s Mary Jo, at the edge of my property.

  “What are you doing?” she asks. She stands there, staring through the dark at the hole in my yard.

  “Just digging in the dirt,” I say. “What are you doing?”

  She creeps closer to get a better look. Something about my answer doesn’t sit well with her. She looks at my shovel, then at me. “My folks are playing cards next door. What are you making?”

  “Well,” I say, “it’s sort of a project, I guess.”

  Her eyes are wide and luminous, held steady on the dark puddle of water. She sighs. “I can’t swim.”

  “Oh, it’s not for swimming.”

  She waits for me to explain, but when I don’t, she blurts, “It looks like a grave.”

  I laugh a little, then take a good look at the hole. Sure enough, it does look that way. “You’re right,” I say, without thinking.

  “Are you digging a grave?”

  “No,” I say quickly.

  She backs up a few steps. “When my grandpa died, they put him in a hole like that. Are you gonna bury someone?”

  “Oh, no. Of course not. It’s not a grave.”

  “Did someone die?”

  “No,” I assure her. “It’s not what you think—”

  She keeps backing up, her voice rising. “Did you kill someone?”

  I reach my hand out to stop her. “No! It’s a spa, okay? It’s a mud bath!”

  She looks cautiously at the hole again. “Killing is a sin,” she warns, continuing her slow escape.

  “It’s a mud bath,” I say. “For relaxing. Grown-ups sit in mud to relax!”

  She squints at me. “No they don’t. My parents don’t.”

  “Well, some do.”

  “You’re lying. People don’t sit in mud.”

  “Sure they do.”

  She looks terrified. I decide some levity might ease her fears. I jump in the hole. “See?” I splash around, toss some mud in the air for added effect. “It’s fun!”

  She stares at me, aghast. A loud clucking noise escapes her throat, and she unintentionally jumps straight up in the air. She lands, spins around, and dashes toward the black edge of my yard, the soles of her feet white flashes in the night.

  I want to yell more assurances to her, but she’s gone. Oh well. She’ll keep my little secret; it’s her secret now too. I lay back and try to enjoy my new creation. The mud’s consistency is all wrong, though, and the water is way too cold. It’s downright freezing. I hear shuffling in the far reaches of the yard and wonder if Mary Jo has returned in a more jovial mood, but soon Zero comes up to the edge. When he sees me, he lets out a big sigh and lies down.

  “It’s a spa,” I tell him. “For relaxing.”

  He doesn’t have anything to add, so we sit there for a while together, under the silence of the starry night.

  chapter 37

  The next morning, I am restless. I stand before the kitchen window, cereal bowl in hand, shoveling wheat flakes in my mouth. I chomp and slurp while staring at the apparent grave I’ve dug in the backyard. I finish eating, toss my empty bowl in the sink, and wonder what to do with myself.

  Instinctively, I grab the phone to dial Natalie. Her number makes the shape of a house with half of a roof. I punch the speed dial instead and hit send. Maybe I can get some answers out of her about my CAT scan. The musical beep-boops sing out like so many other speed-dial songs—for all I know it’s all the same song, put there to let me know everything is working.

  I heard somewhere that soda machines actually had to be rebuilt by engineers because they were too quiet. People would put their money in the machine, press a selection, and somewhere between the selection pressing and the five seconds it took to drop the correct beverage, the customer would lose his temper and kick the shit out of the machine. Five seconds. Too many machines were being destroyed, so the engineers redesigned them to include loud clicks and buzzes and a tumbling drop to fill in the silence.

  The problem with my cell phone isn’t that it’s too quiet, it’s just inconsistent. Somehow my house is stuck between the analog tower and the digital tower. Every two minutes my connection changes. Analog, digital, roam. One bar, four bars, no service. It seems random when I’m talking, but there’s a pattern, I’m sure of it. Like someone turning a switch in the Great Cell Phone Lab, and I’m the rat experiment. How many clicks will make the rat throw the phone against the wall?

  Natalie picks up, but I can’t hear her voice.

  “It’s your brother!” I yell, as if by sheer volume I will transmit a better signal. Natalie has had it with my shoddy coverage, and I keep telling her I’m going to throw my phone out the window one day. She tells me I always say that.

  “Sid? Is that you?” Ksssh.

  “It’s me. Can you hear me?” Ksssh. Ksssh. “Nat?”

  “Yeah, I can hear you. What’s up?”

  “There you are.”

  “When are you going to get a new phone?” she asks.

  “Tomorrow. I promise.”

  Another click. More static. Silence.

  Dial tone.

  I press speed-dial number two. Beep boop boop, it sings. Boop boop beep. She picks up.

  “Make it quick, Sid.”

  “Sorry. I’m really going to throw this out the window one day. Seriously.”

  “Promises, promises.”

  “I wanted to know if you heard back about the CAT scan. I know it takes a while, but—”

  Kshhh. Click.

  “Hello?”

  Beep boop boop, boop boop beep. Another voice. “Hello, Dr. Kssssh’s office.”

  “Natalie?”

  “Kssssh is with a patient right now.”

  “Linda, it’s me, Sid.” Linda is Natalie’s office manager, and she doesn’t like me because I often refer to her as the secretary. She is not the secretary, she has pointed out, she is the office manager, and she could use a secretary herself. “Can I please talk to Nat?”

  “She just ran down the hall. She’s really busy today.”

  “Can you just ask her—”

  Analog. Digital. Roam.

  “Hello?” Linda’s voice does a herky-jerky dance. “What did you say?”

  I shout through the waves of static. “Tell her to call me back!”

  Dial tone. No signal.

  When I throw the phone against the wall, it hits with a loud crack, but to my dismay, it doesn’t shatter into a million pieces—not even a few dozen. It’s only scratched on one side. I flip it open and look at the screen.

  Four bars.

  I stare at my damaged phone, and wait for my heart to stop beating so fast. The coverage bars pulse up and down like the decibel meter on a stereo system, and I get lost in the rhythm of a memory. It’s one I haven’t had in a while. In it, I’m lying in a gurney.

  chapter 38

  “Do you know where you are?” the voice asked. I could hear intercoms above me and clattering wheels below me. I was strapped to the gurney. The controlled urgency of a woman’s voice felt like the way a nurse speaks, and I was putting it all together when she said it: “You’re at a hospital.” Judging by the speed of the passing lights above, I guessed this was also an emergency. I was right. “There’s been an accident. You’re being taken down to trauma right now. It’s important that you lie still.”

  Square after square of ceiling tile passed above me, every few beats a flash of blinding white light. All I could think about was where the dog went. I must have kicked or flinched at one of the flashes because the nurse reached
around to tighten down the straps across my legs. I wanted her to tie down my arms and my torso too, so I could never leave the gravity of the cart. I was afraid I might fly off and float into the sky. And I couldn’t stop wondering where my dog went, which was strange because I knew neither Zoe nor I owned one. I wondered if Zoe was around, but somehow knew she wasn’t, so I didn’t ask.

  A vague block of time passed, with various fussing and explanations. Most of it happened under bright lights. Strangers’ heads floated in and out of my field of vision. Flashes of hot and cold and relief and pressure happened at unannounced intervals, and finally I made it to my resting room. It was quiet there, and dark—such a relief, the lack of light—like a cool bath after a day in the desert. They’d wrapped my head in gauze, so I could only see from my left eye, and something must have gone wrong with my mouth because I had a rubber piece across my teeth and packing under my lips.

  My shift nurse arrived. A sturdy blond woman in her forties, she had especially meaty forearms. Her motions felt rehearsed: she draped an extra blanket across my body, tutored me on the emergency call button, pointed out the location of the bathroom. She spoke in a singsong way that she might have assumed was soothing and carefree, but was actually difficult to follow. It quickly became aggravating.

  As she rolled the Venetian blinds open, slats of pink sliced across her uniform. She looked like a giant candy cane. “What a wonderful sunset,” she sang, and gestured for me to take a look. But my one good eye was blind with pink and all I could do was shut it tight to keep out the burning. “So wonderful, sunsets,” she hummed to herself. “Would you like this kept open?”

  “No,” I grunted through the packing and the dried blood and the rubber, then thought, Close the damn blinds.

  “I’ll leave them open for you,” she whispered, and exited the room.

  Days later, my good eye worsened and the doctor rolled gauze across that too.

  Natalie eventually came to visit. I could hear her voice in the room, but through the bandages she was only a vague form with blurry appendages moving around as she spoke. “We’ll make it through this,” the blob said, “just like we always do.”

  She was right; we did make it through. Ten days later, we drove home and continued to breathe and eat and sleep and work. But I think part of both of us also didn’t make it through. A couple of months after my accident, Natalie moved out to live with her boyfriend Jake, and I was left to live in our childhood home by myself. She abandoned the part of her that didn’t make it through and started a new life as a hardworking physician, wife, and soon-to-be mother. And the part of me that didn’t make it through, well, I guess I was still looking for that.

  chapter 39

  The four bars on my phone are holding steady, finally, while my hands are anything but. I push speed-dial, but accidentally hit the wrong number. I slap it shut and open it again. The coverage bars flicker. I dial the half-house shape.

  “Thank you for calling Oak Valley Medical,” the recording says. “All of our lines are busy right now, but we will get to you as soon as we can.”

  Linda once pointed out that their office phone system doesn’t allow them to see incoming numbers. So now I know the lines really are busy. I’m not being ignored, I’m just in line with everyone else who’s trying to get hold of Natalie or one of the other eight physicians who share the office with her. So I should be feeling patient. All I need is thirty seconds. I just want to know what the CAT-scan results say. I just want a reason for the lilacs in my head—even though deep down, under the pink car-wash foam, the black-and-white cat, the visions of orange sunsets, and my blue Zoe bliss, I’m pretty sure I know the reason.

  “There are four calls ahead of you,” the recording says.

  The lilac swell is back; I have to lie down. I walk to my bedroom and stretch out on the bed, and listen to the orchestral Muzak pipe through the phone. The music reminds me of old-time silent movies, the kind my mom used to watch.

  chapter 40

  The lilac bushes were in the back, a long line of them that made up the property boundary. They’d grown high, about seven or eight feet, and those two weeks in May when they bloomed, it was really something. The air was heady with sweetness. You couldn’t help but breathe deeper and more often to keep that scent in your head.

  Mom and I were out cutting off clumps of lilac to put inside the house and we were doing this deep breathing to smell everything, and we both got a little light-headed, I think, because we weren’t talking as much and she started laughing, which made me start to laugh, and soon we were laughing at our laughing, which led to more, and I remember reading somewhere that what the devil hates most is when families laugh together because that means they are full of love and hope and joy. And I thought, boy, Satan must be pissed right now, which made me laugh even harder. Finally we wound down and kept clipping lilacs, and I remember feeling a little dizzy. Once I got my head back, I looked over and saw Mom lying in the grass. “Mom?” I asked, and leaned down to her. “Mom, are you all right?” I asked as she lay still in the grass, staring up at the sky.

  Rivulets of blood. That’s what I remember thinking. A spy novel I read once described the heroine’s gunshot wound this way, as it bled across her alabaster skin: tiny rivulets of blood. It was almost magical. But in real life, it just looked like a straight line of bright red color, plain and simple, from her nose to her cheek to the ground. I was afraid to touch her.

  “Mom?” I asked again.

  chapter 41

  The orchestra music stops abruptly, followed by a few seconds of silence. I stand up to more actively wait for Linda or Natalie or anybody to answer. The coverage bars teeter and sway.

  “There are two callers ahead of you,” the recording tells me in a cheery voice. The violins and cellos continue.

  “Damn it,” I mutter, and kick the air. I come to my senses and realize I could’ve used the house phone line and avoided all this hassle, which only makes me more upset. But there is no way I’m hanging up now. “No way,” I say to myself in the dresser mirror, and give the dresser a little push with my foot.

  I remember being in the hospital with Natalie when we found out Mom was never coming back. The two of us sat at a waiting-room table adjacent a window. Nat had just verbalized the reality of our new life without Mom, said something like “She’s not coming back” or something more obvious, like “Mom is dead.” I don’t remember the exact words because as she was saying them, the sun rose above the horizon, and that awkward first light of day filled the room with a heavy, yellow haze. Like something out of the movies. It bothered me when it happened like that, like a manufactured scene. The new light as our old lives had passed. On to the next chapter in the book of life. That kind of shit. I just wanted to go home and sleep. We’d been there for hours and I knew she was dead the moment she dropped in front of the lilac bushes. All of this waiting around was for nothing.

  “You are the next caller,” the recording cheers. “Someone should be with you shortly. Thank you for calling Oak Valley Medical.” The music drops out, followed by a series of queer electronic noises. I imagine an old-school switchboard operator weeding her way through a wall of impossibly tangled cords, searching for mine with one hand, unplugging someone else’s with another. I stare into space, waiting for my connection. The odd sounds continue, and then something more familiar.

  Click.

  Ksssh.

  Dial tone.

  “No,” I mutter, and start to smile. The absurdity of this is funny. But I’m not feeling funny, and I look up at the dresser mirror and find a way to express how I am feeling. My fist lights up in a blossom of pain. The shattering sound is exactly what I need.

  chapter 42

  I watch the tanks to keep my mind off the needle in my hand. Memorial Hospital was a good choice because it offers a wonderful distraction with its cable television, but round-the-clock coverage of the war is not helping my woozy stomach. Not to mention that the intern working me ov
er can’t be more than twelve years old. I know he needs to learn suturing sometime, but I’d prefer that it wasn’t on my hand on this morning. The pressure of the needle is quickly replaced with a painless, tingling sensation, for which I’m grateful.

  The doctor never told me his name, so I’ll call him Chip. Chip is busy preparing instruments on his surgical tray: bright, metallic objects that smell of steel and alcohol. I can’t watch.

  I’m at Memorial instead of Oak Valley because showing up at Oak Valley with my hand bleeding would’ve been the perfect reason for Natalie to call a Section Eight on me. “I don’t get it, so you were mad at your phone?” she would’ve asked. Linda would’ve rolled her eyes. Better that Natalie not know about it, so here I am.

  Channel 42 is doing its best to entertain with highlights of a recent desert battle. Angry men in robes launch a makeshift artillery round from one mountain to another. It explodes out of the barrel with ferocious velocity, screaming through the hot air. Moments later a puff of smoke flashes in the distance, a disappointing finish to them, as it inflicts no damage to the unseen enemy. The rebels seem tired with their latest attack. They rest behind a sandbag bunker and smoke cigarettes.

  Chip tugs on my hand. He must be confusing the fine art of sutures with the yarn-loop picture he got from Grandma last Christmas.

  “Easy, tiger,” I say.

  Peripherally, I see him stealing glances to monitor my agitation level. He takes a deep breath and goes back in, just as a soldier on TV swings a metal detector across a sandy road. He gingerly steps forward and swings again. He does this swinging and stepping in all directions, his dog by his side.