A Day In the Death of Walter Zawislak

by Molly O'Keefe

  “Great,” Peter said. “You’ve changed your past, gotten rid of some of that sick baggage you carry. So?”

  “So what?” Walter asked.

  “What day?”

  Walter swallowed. Buying the ring hadn’t made him ready to lose his wife and daughter all over again. “I thank you, Peter, I really do, for the chance to change that, but I can’t go back—”

  “Oh, for the love of God,” Peter muttered. The earth rumbled, ready to spit out some other filing system that would lead Walter to yet another day of disappointments. “We’re just going to have—”

  “Peter.” Walter stared at the clouds past the top of the pine tree and remembered what the kid had told him at the beginning. That his body was water, mist. The boy was wrong, his leg still throbbed, but he wished it were true. He wished he was wind. Something that floated. Anything but this heavy flesh-and-bone body. “Let me go.”

  “I can’t.” The boy shrugged. “Policy—”

  “Forget policy!” Walter cried, the volcano of his dormant temper building from his gut. “Forget it.” He was a dead man, tired of dying. “Haven’t you seen enough?” he shouted up at the sky, blue and white and so bright it hurt his eyes, toward whoever was on the other end of Peter’s device. Whoever still pulled the strings. “There’s nothing for me to relive. It’s all a waste. I missed Jennifer’s birth. I didn’t get promoted. My wife died and I drank my life away. Buying Rosie that ring doesn’t change everything.”

  “It did for her.”

  “Well, great! I’m...it did?”

  Peter nodded. “What day do you think she relived?”

  “The day Jennifer was born.” Of course. She was a devoted mother.

  “She said…” Peter looked down at the device in his hand and read whatever was printed there “…and I quote, ‘Relive thirty hours of labor, alone without Walter? You’ve got to be kidding me.’”

  Walter smiled, imagining her saying that.

  “She picked the birthday when you proposed. You changed her life with that ring.”

  Walter swallowed and took two steps back. Another.

  “So, you see, your father. Your wife. You did more good than you think. You were a good man, Walter Zawislak.”

  “How can you say that?” Frustration bubbled under his skin. “Look at what you’ve seen.”

  “I’ve seen a man trying really hard.”

  “Look at the days after Rosie died. Look at the days before I met her. Look at the day Jennifer came home from school. I wasn’t trying on those days!”

  “You’re being foolish and shortsighted,” Peter chastised him, and Walter felt the weight of his life, the burden of years, on his back.

  “And you’re being cruel,” he whispered, his voice a thin gasp. “This isn’t heaven, this is hell.”

  “Well, it’s limbo, actually, we’ve already talked—”

  “I don’t care.” Walter hitched his pants over a belly he hadn’t had when he died. “I am done with this nonsense.”

  Peter stared at him for a long time and Walter stared back unflinching. If this came down to stubbornness, the boy was in for a world of hurt. Walter had hung on to his life by the sheer force of habit, the stubborn grit of waking up and getting out of bed when he had nothing to live for.

  Sunshine faded and wavered behind the eastern trees. Beth’s mother stepped out onto the porch carrying a steaming mug and a sweater for the little girl. She helped her daughter braid each doll’s hair and tie it with pink and blue ribbons, their earlier fight forgotten.

  Peter stood next to them, staring at him with such intensity Walter could feel it. A bird took flight from the tree behind him. Beth and her mother both turned toward him, and for a moment it seemed that the three of them on that porch looked at him with identical blue eyes, gorgeous and deadly with reproach. Their three faces thin and fierce.

  Lights flickered on in houses and the smell of hamburgers cooking over a fire danced around Walter but he didn’t glance away. Even when the boy’s eyes turned black and gold, and Walter could see in them rivers and roads and dogs and his house and lawn, trim and tidy and lush. He saw cannons and war and blood and babies and the white veil of a bride. He saw everything in those eyes and Walter was unmoved. He was stone. Granite. A dead man.

  Please, he prayed, unable to speak. Please let me go.

  “You’re not leaving me a choice,” Peter finally said.

  “That’s the idea, kid. Let me go burn in the fire, or whatever is waiting for me, because I am through with your policy.”

  Peter blinked, looked away, and mumbled under his breath about the ungrateful dead and switching jobs. He started punching things into the device on his hip.

  Walter felt the twitchy cool spasms of relief along nerve-endings.

  Good. Fine. Done. Over.

  “You’re not going to like this,” Peter warned.

  “I don’t like any of it.”

  This was it. The endless lights out he joked about all the time. The peace and rest and quiet he’d craved for fifteen years.

  His knees went loose and his brain numb.

  This is what you want? he asked himself, suddenly wild and frantic with doubt.

  Walter reached for the swing set but his ever-shifting body fell through it. He blinked, and the fuzzy pine trees and blurry fence posts reoriented themselves into sharp relief.

  His vision was corrected. It had happened. He looked up and saw the glimmering gold edges of the clouds and every blade of grass on the ground.

  He laughed. He hadn’t been able to see this well without glasses since after the war. It was amazing. “Hey kid—” He turned to see the boy, directly behind him, and realized Peter wasn’t so young at all. Lines spidered out around his eyes and creased his thin lips. The boy was a man, really.

  And beside him was a men’s bathroom door.

  “No. No more doors.”

  “It’s policy,” Peter said.

  Walter, who had never been able to feel the kid when he touched him, found himself being shoved through the door. His forehead smacked the men’s bathroom sign and he fell, angry and scared, into an unknown men’s room in an unknown part of his life.

  18

  It was just a bathroom. White tiled floors, mysterious grunge of a disturbing yellow color in the corner. A man in one of the stalls sounded as if he were in some distress. Walter couldn’t place it. It was not a bathroom of major significance as far he could tell.

  Not that he had bathrooms of significance.

  “What the hell am I doing here?” he shouted. And Peter arrived, looking like Phillip Michael Thomas at the height of the Miami Vice pastel craze. Walter guessed this mystery bathroom was in the 80s.

  “Patience,” Peter said, and Walter thought that if he could, if it was possible, he would strangle Peter with his baby blue suit jacket.

  Peter pulled himself up onto the white sink.

  “Did you really think you could win a stare down with me? Come on, I’ve been dead for nine years…”

  “Nine?”

  “Yep, and you’ve been dead all of…” he checked his flashy diamond Rolex “…four hours.”

  “How old were you when you died?” Walter was distracted from his bathroom concerns by the mystery of this ageless young man.

  “Why?” Peter swung his sockless, loafered feet.

  “I don’t know. I just can’t seem to get a grip on your age. Sometimes you seem so young, and then I turn around and you look older.” Walter leaned against the dark-paneled wall, right by the phone number of Terri, who apparently wanted to have a good time.

  “You can be any age you want.” Peter laughed. “Everyone just seems to subconsciously choose the age they were the most happy.”

  Walter looked in the mirror over one of the sinks and realized he was about thirty-two. He palmed the paunch that swelled up over his belt.

  He ran a hand through thick brown hair that he had remembered with such passion when all of the gray stuff st
arted clogging the drain in the shower.

  Those had been his happiest years, after being married for a few years before Jennifer became such a sullen mystery. He’d just begun to travel for work and Rosie, well…Rosie had been alive.

  “So? Which age were you most happy?”

  The boy smiled, and before Walter’s newly corrected and slow-to-believe eyes, the boy aged. His hair grew white and sparse, and his face creased and folded and sagged along his jowls and under his eyes. Dark brown liver spots bloomed on his forehead and along his crepey neck. His hands became skeletal and his eyes watery. But they still gleamed.

  “Any age I want,” he said with a toothless grin.

  “That is creepy,” Walter said, and the boy shook himself like a dog and his features rearranged themselves back into the fluid young boy Walter recognized.

  “I’ve figured out what’s really bothering you,” regular Peter said.

  “You?”

  The boy ignored his joke. “You don’t know why they loved you,” he said. “You can’t figure out why a nice woman would choose you.” The truth, like war or death or Rosie leaving him and Jennifer moving on, was unavoidable, a bright light he couldn’t run from. “Am I right?” the boy asked, as if he might win a car.

  “She didn’t think she could have anyone she wanted. She was so insecure. But I knew...I knew she was better than me. She should have had better than me. Better than what I could give her.”

  “Well…” Peter’s smug smile gave Walter chills of foreboding. “I’m going to show you.”

  There was a knock at the door and they both turned.

  “Hello?” a woman’s voice called from the other side of the door. “Walter, are you in there?”

  That voice wrapped around him like a vice.

  “No,” he breathed turning on Peter. “Please don’t do this. I can’t…”

  “You didn’t leave me a choice.”

  Peter leaped from the sink and was gone.

  The door eased open and a woman poked her head in. Her long brown hair fell over her shoulder. Her eyes were clenched shut.

  He was immobile. All the blood and bone and function of his self were gone.

  Rosie.

  The most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He had somehow forgotten that after the doctor’s appointment and the cancer and the months of wasting.

  She glittered and gleamed and sparkled with life. It hurt his eyes; they teared from her brilliance, but he didn’t look away. Didn’t blink.

  “If anyone is in here beside my husband, you better zip up,” she warned, then she counted to three and opened her eyes. “Walter?”

  “Hi, baby,” he whispered.

  He shut his eyes and let himself go. Every resistance gone—he floated back to Rosie.

  February 21, 1982

  Men’s Room, Triple R Rolling Rink

  Jennifer’s 6th Birthday

  * * *

  “Walter?”

  Oh, thank God. Leave it to Rosie to waltz into the men’s room to find him. Walter pushed open the door to the john. “Help me,” he begged his wife.

  Rosie clapped a hand over her mouth. “What have you done?” She dropped her hand but couldn’t stop laughing. “Walter…”

  “I know, I know,” He waddled as best he could out of the tiny stall. “It’s supposed to be a surprise.”

  “Oh!” Her elegant brown brows shot to her forehead. “She’ll be surprised. What are you supposed to be?”

  He looked down at his green legs and the gray sack that was supposed to be an inflated garbage can around his chest and stomach. The top half of the costume with its suspenders and valves and mask was spread out across the floor like a toilet he might have once taken apart.

  “Oscar the Grouch,” he muttered. He had ruined it. That much was obvious. “She seems to like him the best.” He picked up the fuzzy green arms. “Is she having a good time out there?”

  “They’re all having a great time,” Rosie murmured. He nodded, wondering what to do with the costume. Maybe it wasn’t too late to return it, get a full refund.

  “Sweetheart?” his wife asked, and Walter looked up at her. The laughter was gone and tears stood out in her brown eyes. “Were you going to roller skate in that?” Her lips curled and Walter laughed.

  “Seems dumb, huh?” He started the arduous process of shimmying out of the furry green legs.

  “No, no!” Rosie cried, her cool strong hands curling around his wrists. “What are you doing?”

  “She’s not going to like this, her old man running around in a costume. She’s too old—it’s a dumb idea.”

  “Are you kidding?” She stepped close to him, her hands sliding from his wrists to his shoulders to his face. She smiled into his eyes, her own shiny and watery. He could see his reflection in them. He always could. And he never seemed to look as bad as he thought.

  “She’s going to love it,” she whispered. “She’s going to love that her dad did this for her. I love that he did this for her.”

  She stepped closer, making his costume bell out in the rear and he fell backward, awkward and off balance.

  She laughed, caught off balance herself, and they collapsed onto the stool. She landed on his lap, her strong, sturdy arms around his neck. Her whispers—oh you sweet man—in his ears.

  In the end she laced him up. Put some skates on his feet and pushed him out of the bathroom. He was too tall for the costume so he could only see out of half the eye slits, which made skating in a foam garbage can that much more dangerous.

  “Oscar!” He whirled to find Jennifer, which made him overstep and correct and nearly fall all within a second.

  “Are you the birthday girl?” he asked, hoping the brown pigtails in front of him—all he could see in the dark room—were his daughter’s.

  She tugged on his garbage can and he crouched down, slipped and landed hard on the knee of his bad leg. He winced and swore under his breath. He would pay for that tomorrow.

  “Hello, Jennifer,” he said, pulling the costume face down a little so he could see his girl. So pretty in her purple shirt, already looking like so much like Rosie it practically killed him sometimes.

  His baby smiled at him, patted the green fur of his costume.

  “Hi Daddy,” she said.

  December 2, 1980

  Jennifer’s First Recital

  May School Auditorium

  Beaverton, Wisconsin

  * * *

  Walter stirred on the hard wooden seat, struggling to find a comfortable place for his ass on the cracked and peeling auditorium chair.

  “Sit still.” Rosie glared at him out of the corner of her eye and he shot her an exasperated look.

  “If they would start this stuff on time…”

  The Clarksons in front of them turned and shushed him, and Rosie glared and Walter stared up at the ceiling, waiting for the night to be over.

  She was four, and he loved her, but he could give a shit about the other kids pounding out “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” He rolled the program in his hands and hit his knee with it.

  “Stop it!” his wife hissed and yanked the program out of his hand. “I should have just left you at home.”

  The lights dimmed and a spotlight came up on the stage. It roamed for a moment, searching for a target to land on, and finally Mrs. Swenson, the ancient music teacher, fought her way free from behind the red curtain.

  She was wearing a Santa hat and orthopedic shoes.

  “We will start where we usually do, with the youngest students,” she croaked into the microphone without any welcome or small talk. He kind of liked that about Mrs. Swenson. It was just about the only thing he liked about the woman. He had hated her when he was struggling through “Ode to Joy” in the fifth grade with her exhaling the stale stench of coffee and cough drops over his shoulder.

  Rosie was convinced they’d been lucky to get Jennifer into private lessons with the old cow and Walter had gone along with it,
secretly hating that his daughter would be exposed to Mrs. Swenson’s cruel criticism and bad breath.

  But Mrs. Swenson had been saying Jennifer showed quite a bit of talent. He and Rosie laughed privately, wondering what a talented four-year-old sounded like playing the piano. They didn’t have a piano at home so she practiced at school or before her lessons.

  “Though this year our youngest is perhaps our most surprising.” With that, Mrs. Swenson lurched and waddled off and the curtains parted. Jennifer sat center stage at the piano. She was a tiny pink confection in frills and ribbons.

  Perhaps it was the spotlight or the shining great piano that literally dwarfed his little girl, but Walter fell still and couldn’t seem to breathe. He grabbed his wife’s hand and could feel her startled and disgruntled gaze at his profile.

  She’s too little, he thought. So small to be up there alone. It’s too much for a little girl, too much light and too many people watching. This is a mistake.

  Jennifer looked over her shoulder, probably at Mrs. Swenson backstage. Then she turned toward the audience, shielded her eyes from the lights, and looked out at all the parents, most of whom were wishing she would just get on with it.

  She seemed to find him and Rosie where they sat left of center in the third row. Rosie waved one finger and Jennifer waved with her whole hand.

  “Hi Daddy!” she said. The audience laughed and Walter thought he might black out from lack of oxygen.

  “Relax, Walter.” Rosie breathed in his ear. “She’s going to be fine.” Jennifer had to reach up a little to put her fingers on the black and white keys.

  “She’s too young, Rosie. Look at how little—”

  Jennifer bent her head and started to play.

  This was what a four-year-old talent sounded like: like wonder. Like blue skies and new grass. Like beauty and cake and Rosie’s laugh. Like love and change. Like something completely other than him. Something untouchable and pure and clean.