The View From Who I Was

by Heather Sappenfield

  Gabe stopped, but her legs wrapped around his and pulled him deeper within while her hips pushed down. She owned a knowledge I didn’t. Reasoning, doubting, judging were foreign language here. Gabe stilled, a sheen of sweat gluing them. Corpse rested her hands on the swale where his back turned to butt. I luxuriated there as she fanned her missing fingers across this intimate skin.

  Part Three

  Upon A Foreign Shore

  Twenty-Nine

  From Oona’s journal:

  In Nature all life is a question of the minutest, but extremely precisely graduated differences in the particular thermal motion within every single body … The slightest disturbance of this harmony

  can lead to the most disastrous consequences for the major life forms.

  —Viktor Schauberger

  Out the egg-shaped window of Dad’s plane, clouds illuminated by the plane’s lights smeared past. In the dark below rolled the Atlantic. How many thousands of breaths, how many evaporations of different places did each cloud contain? Corpse leaned back, ran her fingers over the tan leather of the chair arm. Were her and Gabe’s breaths from last night in these clouds? Was Ash? When we died, were our spirits lifted on the sighs of the living? Or was Ash up higher at the pearly gates?

  Dad emerged from the cockpit. Corpse could see Dan and Carol’s headphone-topped crew cut and ponytail. Our husband-and-wife pilots glowed excitement for their coming week in Portugal. Corpse glanced at Dad and thought how different their stay was going to be from ours.

  Dad settled into the chair across from her and nodded without seeming to notice. In the week leading to this trip, his eyes had grown even sharper, but there was a jitter behind the sharpness. As if he was being sucked down into himself. Conversation had grown treacherous.

  “It’s going to be okay, Dad,” Corpse said. I wasn’t sure about that.

  After a while Dad eyed Corpse’s pajamas, checked his watch. “It’s late. You should sleep.”

  “I guess.”

  Across the back of the plane were two couches that folded down to comfy beds. Corpse had prepared one with sheets, blankets, and two pillows. The other was still a couch.

  “Want help making the other bed?” she said.

  Dad forced a smile. “I won’t sleep. I’ll just sit here. Maybe doze off.”

  “Why can’t you ever sleep?”

  He shrugged.

  “Could you sleep when you were a kid?”

  He walked behind Corpse’s chair to the bar. She listened to the fridge open and close, to ice clink into a glass, to liquid pour, to a short burst of water from the sink. He strolled to the control panel behind the cockpit and dimmed the cabin lights. He sat back down and set a highball glass holding amber liquid on his thigh. He stirred it with his finger, licked it, and sipped.

  I pictured him sitting just like this in the observatory. Same man, same drink, just a different chair. Except now we were in that sky. Dad spent so much time crossing the sky, or gazing at it.

  They didn’t talk for a while, just stared out that oval window at hypnotizing scraps of glowing clouds.

  “What are you really hoping to achieve with this trip, Oona?” Dad’s voice pulled Corpse back from near sleep. She blinked.

  A shrug rode her shoulders, but she contained it. I mean, wasn’t it obvious? What could she say? For you to get over your parents’ deaths. Work out whatever makes you unable to love. Grow up and stop acting like a kid. Learn to love Mom. Become a normal dad. DEAD GIRL FIXES FATHER. Corpse cocked her head. If she looked at him, her eyes would say those things, so she focused on the clouds. “I want you to get better.”

  “I’m not well?”

  Corpse shrugged.

  “Look at me,” he said.

  Corpse shut her eyes. She touched the heart charms at her neck.

  “Look at me!”

  I thought of the easy bond in that Angel-Kenny gaze. She looked.

  Dad snorted and took a sip of his drink. “Sometimes it’s better to leave things. Alone.”

  “Sure. Things are rolling along just fine,” Corpse said. “Things were rolling along for me too.”

  “I must love you.” His words were flat.

  “What about Mom?”

  Dad scraped his bottom lip with his fingernail, dropped his hand to the chair arm, and looked at Corpse like she’d asked the world’s dumbest question.

  “Okay. How did your parents die?”

  “They drowned.”

  “How?”

  Dad scrutinized his glass.

  “Dad?”

  “Let’s not talk about it.”

  “You never want to talk. You need to,” she said.

  “I’m not sure this is going to turn out how you planned, Oona. There’s not going to be some big happy reunion.”

  “Don’t you have an aunt left?”

  “We lost touch.”

  “Why?”

  Dad shrugged.

  “Was she your dad’s sister? Their brother was the uncle you came to live with in America, right?”

  “After he died, she and I drifted apart.”

  “Drifted?”

  “Look, I’m going back. For you. Isn’t that enough?”

  “But you need to face things.”

  “Face what?”

  “Dad, can you honestly say that you have a loving, happy family? Something’s stopping you. Maybe facing where … well, seeing where you were as a kid … will help.” I couldn’t get over Corpse’s courage. “Maybe something happened there. Maybe facing it will help us all.”

  His gaze made her push back in her chair.

  Thirty

  From Oona’s journal:

  I years had been from home,

  And now, before the door,

  I dared not open, lest a face

  I never saw before

  Stare vacant into mine

  And ask my business there.

  —Emily Dickinson, “Returning,” lines 1-6

  Corpse stepped through the French doors of their elegant hotel room and onto a narrow, metal-railed balcony. Dad had reserved two rooms, but she’d insisted on one, didn’t want him escaping.

  Below stretched a soccer-field-sized plaza with a humongous tiered fountain at each end. In the middle, atop a marble pillar, an iron statue of a guy in a cape faced her. On the twenty-minute cab ride from the airport, we’d seen more four-story statues than we’d seen in our entire well-traveled life.

  “What is this place?” Corpse called over her shoulder to Dad inside.

  “It’s named Rossio Square. That’s all I remember,” he called back.

  “Thanks for nothing,” she muttered. She’d heard that much in his conversation with the cab driver. After Dan and Carol had landed the plane, they’d taxied it to where it would stay while we were here and let Corpse sleep there until seven a.m. U.S. time. We’d been awake two hours now, but it was four o’clock Lisbon time.

  Corpse took in the hills sloping down toward the plaza, covered with orangey-red tiled roofs atop mostly white or yellow stucco walls, occasionally blue or purple or green stucco.

  Corpse googled “Rossio Square” on her phone. She pulled up its map and description. She read loudly, so Dad could hear: “In ancient times, Romans held chariot races here. That wavy pattern in the cobblestones originated with them.”

  No response.

  Corpse looked to a castle that loomed on the right. “That’s St. George’s castle on the hill. Built by the Moors. And those—” She turned left and peered at stone arches resembling a whale’s ribs that poked above buildings on the opposite hill. “Those are the ruins of Carmo Convent.”

  No response.

  “Dad, won’t you even come look?”

  Dad stepped onto the balcony. He sighed. Not the happy-to-be-home kind of sigh. The
don’t-panic kind. He’d changed into jeans and a polo shirt. He scanned everything.

  “That statue in the middle is Dom Pedro. King in the early 1800s,” Corpse read.

  “Dom,” Dad murmured.

  “Back there”—Corpse pointed to the far end of the square, toward a building fronted by six pillared steps like a Greek temple—“is the National Theater. In its place used to be a palace where the royal family entertained guests. During the Inquisition, its back rooms were used to force confessions from heretics.”

  “Force confessions.” Dad shot Corpse a look.

  She blushed.

  “I used to stand on those steps. Dream of seeing a performance,” he said.

  “Really?” Corpse said.

  “A guard would shoo me away.”

  She read, “The palace was destroyed in the earthquake. Earthquake?”

  Dad ran his fingers over his brow, looking at it all in a cringing way. His phone rang. “Excuse me.” He disappeared inside.

  Corpse listened to him talking business and observed the teeming square. Tourists paused to take pictures. Cars, taxis, and busses rolled along the three-lane road that circled it. On the square’s right side, people formed a line as a bus pulled to a stop. A distant trumpet blasted as businessmen and women walked about briskly. From every fourth or fifth storefront stretched the tables of an outdoor café.

  “Yes. Four hundred. Yes. Thank you. Goodbye,” Dad said.

  He didn’t return.

  “Dad, won’t you come back out?”

  He joined her, crossed his arms, and leaned against the hotel’s purple stucco.

  “How many calls do you get a day?” Corpse said.

  He shrugged.

  Corpse googled “Lisbon Earthquake.” She read, “In 1755 a huge earthquake leveled most of this.” She swept her hand across the panorama. “What didn’t fall was ruined by the tidal wave it caused or by fire.”

  “People always talked as if it happened yesterday.”

  “Really?”

  “History dogs people here.”

  “Everything looks so old,” Corpse said.

  “It is. Even the new things are 250 years old. Old and run-down.”

  “I think it’s cool.”

  Lisbon’s light was like looking through fine gauze that blurred the edges of things. The ocean’s humidity, no doubt.

  “That area”—Dad gestured toward St. George’s castle—“survived. The rest of this was rebuilt.” He seemed to catch himself, eyed the roofs below the castle, swallowed like sand blocked his throat, and turned away. A church bell clanged, and his head jerked back toward the hill. Shock filled his face, and for one moment he looked vulnerable. With each of the bell’s four echoing tolls, the muscle at Dad’s jaw tightened.

  Corpse gripped the balcony and sipped a calming breath. “It’s so hilly.” The air felt balmy compared to home. She checked her phone: 62°F. She would put on shorts in a minute. She glanced at Dad and leaned on the rail to seem relaxed.

  “So, wow! Romans were here?” she said.

  “Egyptians, Romans, Moors, French, Spaniards. Portuguese endure.”

  A group of boys, maybe eleven years old and dressed in matching Boy Scouty uniforms and wearing packs with sleeping bags strapped on, filed across the square. I thought of the kids at the Indian school, of Ash, of Gabe, even Tanesha, and Corpse longed to say, We all endure, Dad. That’s life. This constant suffering was a poison. Why couldn’t she and Dad just have fun on this trip?

  Accordion music from a street performer rose to them. Corpse watched the closest fountain’s water arc inward from the smaller statues around its perimeter. She remembered watching that Denver fountain when she’d ditched the leadership conference. Remembered acting just like Dad was now. It seemed like reaching back into a nightmare.

  “What should we do today?” She forced cheerfulness into her voice.

  “You’re calling the shots, kiddo,” he said, like whatever.

  Dad had always stood out for the tint of his skin, the set of his mouth, the proud way he carried his head and shoulders. In Lisbon, he looked like everyone else. So did Corpse. Everywhere were women with her chocolate eyes, her lush dark hair, that way her waist connected to her hips that drove guys crazy.

  Their talk, though, was nothing she recognized. She could hear some Spanish behind the slushy French-sounding accent, but there were tons of words she’d never heard, and she couldn’t grasp any patterns. Yet Dad spoke it. As he asked the waiter about something on the menu, she watched a language she did not know flow from his mouth. A chill crept up her spine as she remembered Gabe’s description of him on her suicide night.

  “Oona?” Dad said.

  “The cod,” she said.

  The waiter nodded and wrote on a little pad. He looked sixty. Trim, with a neat moustache, and serious about his job. Dad ordered. The waiter slipped his pad of paper into the pocket of a red apron.

  Dad’s phone rang. He answered it.

  They’d wandered to this first café on the pedestrian street that stretched adjacent their hotel. Corpse scooted her chair from the umbrella’s shade into the direct sun and shrugged off her sweater. She looked down at her flip-flops’ worn spots where her pinkie toes had once been. She rested her hand on the white tablecloth and studied its scars. She peered down the street: café after café, ending in what looked like an arch.

  She heard music. The music Dad played nights in his observatory. Its source was a storefront two doors down. In its window hung a poster of a woman with fifties-style short hair, cradling a guitar as she plucked its strings. Her face seemed lost to the song flowing from her mouth.

  On the sidewalk, below the poster, sat a woman with her legs curled to her side beneath a tattered green skirt. A yellow scarf was knotted under her chin. Threads hung from her sweater’s red arm as she held up a dented saucepan to people walking past. Her mouth pleaded in words Corpse couldn’t hear. For a moment no one passed, and the woman looked directly at Corpse with piercing eyes. Corpse looked away. Dad hung up.

  “That woman on the poster.” She nodded toward the storefront. “She’s the one you listen to back home?”

  Dad didn’t look at the poster. “Amália.”

  “Who is she?”

  The waiter set two bottles of water and two glasses on the table.

  Dad didn’t answer.

  Corpse googled “Amália.” “When she died in 1999, her state funeral lasted three days. All of Portugal mourned.”

  “No one sings fado like Amália.”

  “Fado?”

  “Portugal’s music.”

  Corpse googled “fado.” “It says the way to see fado is in local clubs. Fado helped people endure the dictatorship. What dictatorship? When?” Corpse scanned the bustling street, looking for signs of such history.

  “It ended two years after I left.” Dad sat back and inhaled. I thought how he breathed in that beggar woman’s exhalations.

  “She sounds beautiful, but so … depressing,” Corpse said.

  The beggar woman held up her pan to a passing man who clasped the hand of a little girl. The man gave the little girl some change, and she dropped it in the pan.

  “It’s so-dawge,” Dad said.

  “So what ?”

  “So-dawge.”

  Corpse pulled up Google Translate. “How do you spell it?’

  Dad snorted. “S-A-U-D-A-D-E.”

  The waiter delivered their food.

  “There’s no translation. What’s saudade?” She savored this first Portuguese word on her tongue.

  The waiter made a knowing half-smile.

  “Obrigado,” Dad said to him. Thank you, I realized.

  The waiter made a little bow and left.

  “How do you remember Portuguese?” Corpse said.

 
“My uncle,” Dad said. “He insisted I speak it at home. It’s a little rusty, but embedded.”

  A memory of that uncle’s funeral flooded me: Mom and Dad dressed in black. Mom watching Dad’s every move. An expression on his face that hinted at the one he wore now. To settle herself, Corpse took a bite of the cod. It was the best fish she’d ever tasted.

  “Well?” she said. “What’s saudade?”

  Dad took a bite and looked around, mulling. “Longing. Nostalgia.”

  “Like missing things?”

  “Sort of. But also things you haven’t lost yet. It’s hard to explain.”

  “No. I think I get it. Longing’s what made me kill myself.”

  “Oona—”

  “What? It’s true!”

  Dad sat back. “But saudade is about enduring. It’s in Portuguese blood.” He raised his hand into the woman’s singing.

  “Blimey!” Corpse said.

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Life’s hard all over, Dad.”

  He scanned her, nodding in that unknowing way, and his eyes turned chocolate for a second. “Maybe I should have helped you understand it.”

  “Yes, well. That would require communicating.”

  His stare became glare. They both looked away.

  They ate and listened to Amália. I thought how her music drifted over the head of the beggar woman, was carried on all their breaths. Corpse worked not to inhale those dreary notes, but I thought how this music had lived in the basement of Chateau Antunes all along. How many other hidden things pulsed in our veins?

  Corpse leaned forward. “Can we hear fado music tonight?”

  Dad slouched back.

  “You love it, right?” she said.

  He poured more bottled water into his glass, sipped it, and watched her over the rim.

  I thought, Seriously? Grow up and answer her. But Corpse said, “Please?”

  Dad’s phone rang. His face washed with relief. He held up his finger, rose, and strolled down the street, phone to his ear, movements stiff. He passed the beggar woman and she didn’t hold up the pan, just watched him, and then looked at Corpse like she knew all our secrets.