by Dodds, Colin
With all the focus I could manage, I helped settle Dad into bed with his two new remote controls. He was thrilled to have so many channels again. From the kitchen, Joyce bitched about the refrigerator being empty, which it shouldn’t be, since she had explicitly told me she wasn’t going to do the shopping or the cleaning. I gave her a twenty and told her to order delivery for the day.
My suits, shirts and ties were all dry cleaned and hanging in my apartment in New York, waiting for a shot at employment. So Dad muted the TV and described from bed which suits he thought would fit me. I picked through the closet and finally hit on a dark blue double-breasted suit with a chalk stripe. I picked a dark tie, which Dad argued was too expensive for me to wear. But he relented. I hugged him and left. Joyce was puttering around the living room, with that TV tuned to a cooking show.
Route 9 was crushingly vivid with memory. It was like my whole life was happening all at once just to keep what had happened from being true. I tried to breathe evenly, tried not to squeeze the steering wheel too hard. Crossing Lake Quinsigamond into Worcester, I drove past UMass hospital. Then past Bell Pond where Dad said he’d found a duffel bag full of guns when he was a kid. Then down the rougher end of Belmont Hill where one house flew an oversized POW-MIA flag for my whole childhood. When I was ten, I found out what it meant, and imagined the mother and father inside, waiting and hoping that their flag would somehow help their lost son. Then the foot of the hill where a teacher at St. Johns said you could see all three kinds of columns—Doric, Ionic and Corinthian—embodied in the Auditorium, Vocational High School and Courthouse. The whole drive was fringed with digressions. They grew more intense until I parked off Highland Street, across from Tortilla Sam’s.
Outside the Bean Counter, I saw Fin. He was in a shirt, tie, khakis that were several sizes too big, and sneakers. He was pacing the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette. I waved and he walked up to me. He’d been crying. He gave me a big hug. We repeated our only article of faith—that we couldn’t believe it, then Fin let go. He forgot his wallet, so I bought him a coffee and we sat down. Wild-eyed, he started talking.
“After you left, we kept on drinking and talking about Joe until late. Then some guys started chanting that the Patriots were going to the Super Bowl, and I just found out that’s true. But it seemed disrespectful, and I was so drunk that I thought they were talking about something else altogether. Don’t even get me started on what I thought. But I told them that they were dog shit and their Patriots were dog shit and next thing you know I’m about to fight the whole bar.”
“Marissa told me.”
“I don’t care if the Pats are going to the Super Bowl, those guys were fuckin’ dicks.”
“It’s a little hard to get excited about professional sports right now. So was that the end of the night?”
“Well, we had to leave Ralph’s. So we went to a few more bars, then Kyle drove me and Marissa and some other people back to Marissa and Joe’s place, and we drank what was left there. It was this nasty rum, but we finished it. I think Kyle and Marissa hooked up.”
The door rang open, but it was no one we knew. Fin leaned in close and sought out my eyes with his.
“Jim, can I tell you something, something weird?”
“Sure.”
“I fucked a girl who only had one leg last night. I did it on Joe’s bed.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sure that somewhere, Joe gets a huge kick out of that. No pun intended.”
“It was weird. We were at the Dive Bar. I didn’t even mean to hook up. I was just so fucking sad. And I started talking to this girl I kind of know. I felt like I was missing a leg, metaphorically, you know? And this girl Sharon—the one with a missing leg—it just seemed like she could relate, like me and her were on the same page.”
“Sure.”
“Other than the leg, she was pretty hot. Except that she was kind of heavy and had kind of bad skin. I don’t know. She just seemed like she understood,” Fin said.
“Man, there’s nothing wrong with a one-legged woman. Could you, like, do more positions?”
“That’s what I always thought! But then the stump rubs up against you and that sort of ruins it.”
“Oh. I can imagine that. Ooh,” I said and we laughed.
Fin and I talked about the wake and the funeral until Marissa showed up with Kyle and the father of her child. The father, Mike, was a solid guy I’d only met once or twice before. I had another coffee and Fin cried on other shoulders. Marissa sat down across from me with a cupcake. She was in a tight, black, almost-shiny dress. It was distracting.
“Do you think it’s wrong to have a cupcake for breakfast? I think it’s fine. A cupcake is just a muffin with frosting, if you think about it,” Marissa said.
“I’m no expert, but I think a muffin is made from different stuff.”
“Whatever, fuck it. Hey Jim, don’t look, but is Kyle looking at me?” she asked in a low voice.
“I don’t know.”
“Shit. He’s been all over me ever since we hooked up. That was just a mourning thing. I mean, should I tell him that? Just to make it clear?”
“I don’t know. Kyle seems like he can take a hint.”
“It’s just that I have Mike here, and my boyfriend is going to be at the wake later. I don’t want him all over me.”
“If he does more than look, then say something.”
“I’m fucking pissed at him. So he was there when Joe got shot. You were too, but only for part of it. And I asked him like a hundred times whether or not the cop identified himself before he fired. And he was all like ‘Oh, I’m not sure. I don’t think so.’ And that’s like the most important fucking point when this goes to court. So after we hook up, he tells me that he thinks the guy might have said something about being a cop before he shot Joe. But he waited until after we already hooked up to tell me the truth. It’s just fucking scummy behavior.”
Marissa’s phone rang. She raised it to her ear, but missed her head. The phone flew over her shoulder and broke into three pieces on the floor. She looked at the pieces, then at me and we both laughed until our faces were red. The laughter scooped out some of the cinderblock in my stomach.
Out on Highland Street, Marissa stepped into traffic without looking. A car stopped short and honked. Marissa gave it the finger.
“Hey, take it easy. Watch where you’re going,” Mike said calmly.
“Fuck that. What are they going to do, hit me? They don’t have the balls,” Marissa said to both Mike and the traffic.
Upon saying it, her jaw dropped. She knew she’d just parroted Joe’s last words. Then she looked at me and sputtered. The two of us broke into desperate laughter all the way to our cars.
60.
The funeral directors were two clean, white-haired Irish men, who reluctantly let us in early. Inside, Justine was talking with her brother and sister. Her brother’s wife was keeping a respectful distance along with the two adopted kids on the other side of the room. Grief can be radioactive like that.
Grief pressed me against the windshield of my eyes, unable to consider my own speedometer, odometer or radio station. There was only what was in front of me—two rooms, both sober, clean and understated with white walls, beige carpet and wood trim. Joe’s family received people in one room. Joe’s closed casket was in the other. After embracing Justine and Claire, I went into the room with Joe’s body and stayed there for most of the next few hours. It was less crowded, for one thing. For hours, a line of people stretched out the door, waiting to give Justine their kind, futile words
A parade from the past came by. Old friends, ex-girlfriends, classmates, acquaintances with whom I’d lost touch and would likely never see again. Jeff and Emily came by. The nerves around our upbringing sang as we embraced and talked in the benches in the back of the coffin room. In and out of tears, I visited the body again and again, kneeling by it to pray, as people do. I wanted to feel acceptance or catharsis. But no amount of staring or
praying or crying would relieve what careened in me. I knelt by his box and groped for an honest thing to say.
Bon voyage was too glib and too French. You dumb fucking prick seemed too harsh for a guy who’d already been shot to death that week. See you soon seemed too maudlin and speculative. I love you felt right, but embarrassing. How could you do this? was the question I wanted, in all my rage, to ask. But it wasn’t the kind of thing I’d ever asked him in all our time as friends. I’ll remember I swore. That was the closest I could come to anything honest to say to the body in the box before me. But it wasn’t all that satisfying.
I couldn’t cry enough or talk enough or not talk enough. It was all in vain. There was a break after the first three hours and Justine came into the room to look at the casket with Claire. She just stood over the body. I went over to the pair of them. We just looked at each other, each looking for the other to say something.
“Oh Jim,” was all she said, then the crying took over.
“It’s going to be a long time before we really know what we lost. I don’t know when,” I said.
Then she and Claire left and I was alone with Joe again, with something new and terrible to say.
You said we’d take LSD with our grandchildren. Who the fuck am I going to do that with now?
It was enough to force my head down into my hands. Marissa came up behind me and put her arm over my shoulders.
“I know, I know. Hey, Mike went out to McDonald’s to get some food. You want some?”
I nodded and, for the hundredth time that day, collected myself. Mike was in the back of the room with a bag of cheeseburgers and french fries.
Marissa and I, Kyle, Fin and two or three others stayed through the second half, along with Joe’s family. I went back and forth, talking to people I hadn’t seen in years on the benches at the back of the coffin room and then, on my knees, trying to talk to Joe. Claire and Justine went back to the coffin whenever the line of people thinned out. I was by the body with Fin when Claire opened the lid of the coffin. It was something no one else had thought to do. I held my breath and looked at his inanimate face—nostrils dry, skin alternately like powder and like wax. He was in a suit, and his big Iroquois-looking face was impossibly at rest. I stared, as if that would help it sink in.
“Claire, it would be an honor if I could be a pallbearer at the funeral,” Fin offered.
“Joe’s going to be cremated after the wake.”
“Where is that going to be?” Fin asked.
“It’s going to be a small gathering, private, just for family,” Claire said firmly.
61.
Marissa said a bunch of people were going back to Ralph’s that night, but I passed on it. I went to go see Dad and Joyce. But when I got there, Dad was asleep and Joyce was gone, leaving a long note in perfect cursive that listed the many things I needed to buy and do before tomorrow. The only item that seemed truly urgent was Dad’s prescriptions. I checked my phone to see if I could make the pharmacy by seven and saw that I had another dozen voicemail messages, and that it was too late. I checked on Dad, whose bedroom door was ajar. He was snoring.
Still in a daze, I logged onto my e-mail account in the spare room. I had a lot of them, from Worcester and New York, a mix of ancient friends offering condolences and new acquaintances I was hoping would help me find a job. Reading through them, my entire life in New York seemed like a story someone told me when they were in a hurry. But I discounted that feeling of strangeness, as I knew I’d have to discount so many feelings. I got back to work for the person I would be when the feelings stopped. I scheduled and rescheduled a pair of interviews for the week after next. I spell-checked each e-mail twice, and I needed to. I walked into the living room and called Olive.
“Hey mister, I didn’t expect to hear from you.”
“Yeah, well, I was at a wake all day. Also, Dad came home from the rehab place this morning. So … what are you doing?”
“Just chatting online with some friends, and watching some TV. You were at a wake?”
“Yeah. I’ll tell you all about it. Come meet me. I want to see you, now.”
“I don’t know. I was going to … okay.”
We agreed to meet in the parking lot by the Newbury Comics, in the shopping plaza across from the Natick Collection. On the drive, the winds still blew hard inside of me, but I couldn’t cry. I waited in the empty parking lot and turned up the heat in the SUV. I was hungry for something that would feel like life. Olive pulled up in her old Volvo plastered with bumper stickers. I walked out to meet her.
“How are you?” she said, offering me a kiss.
“I’m here. I’m breathing. I guess I’m doing pretty well.”
We walked back to Dad’s SUV and got in. Then things got quiet, even standoffish for a long minute. Not knowing what to do, I leaned over to kiss her. She kissed back for a moment, but I pulled away. It seemed that another appetite had failed me.
“So what happened? Whose wake were you at?”
And I told her all of it. There was no way to make the story pretty, to pretend there were any heroes or hope in it. At the end, she took my hand and we sat there.
“You hungry?” she asked after a long time in the quiet.
“I am. I’m starving actually. I didn’t even notice until now.”
“You want to get some Kentucky Fried Chicken and look at the lake?” Olive asked.
We got the chicken and drove to a spot she knew by downtown Natick where you could park and look at the lake. The snow on the frozen lake was untouched, pure and white. The moon shone down so the lake was like a movie screen playing a film about nothing. Every so often, a freight or commuter train would race along the opposite shore, howling like a mythical beast. We ate the chicken and used the bones like spoons to eat the mashed potatoes and gravy. When I cried, Olive didn’t ask why or try to soothe me.
“My father got a new doctor. He wants him to go back into surgery next month,” Olive said into the silence.
I looked at her, then took her greasy hand in my greasy hand and squeezed. The silence came back, better than the consolation either of us could offer. We kissed again, and this time it kept on. We crawled over the seat to the back of the SUV and I tore open her black stockings. We made love among the golf balls, Dunkin Donuts wrappers, old receipts and paper towels. I was aroused in a dire sort of way, defending my beachhead in the world of the living with each thrust, each toothy kiss. It worked a little better than my other attempts at catharsis, which is to say it failed. Afterward, we drove back to the shopping plaza, still quiet, as if the cold night was a church. The sick fathers, the chance meeting, the excitement of touching, the dead friend, the vast uncertainties all did add up to something. And when we kissed good night, it all seemed charged with an unguessable meaning.
But my sense of mystery didn’t make it out of Northborough intact. When I got back, I could hear Dad’s TV, which meant he could hear the door. I walked down the hallway and he looked up at me. The nurse had put a chair by the bed, which made his bedroom feel like a hospital room.
“Hey, how are you?” he asked, muting the TV.
I was getting sick of the question. But I gave it one more hedging, okay-but-not-okay go. I sat down in the chair. He asked about the wake and I told him.
“It’s good that you’re going to the whole thing. I don’t know if it was the war or what it was, but I have a really hard time with that stuff. I’ll go to pay my respects, but I’ll leave as soon as I can. I hate going to those things. When’s the funeral?” he asked.
“Tomorrow. I don’t know if it helps—the funeral, the wake. But it makes more sense than anything else right now.”
“Probably. What do you think of Joyce?”
“She seems a little bitchy, but professional at least. I don’t know. How about you?”
“She keeps the heat up too high. And if you think she’s a bitch, then you should hear her on the phone with her husband. It’s nice to know that someone has it wo
rse than me,” Dad joked.
“Maybe she’ll loosen up after a few days.”
“I hope so. At least she’s a worker. She saw a stain on the sheets and changed them right away. She said it looked like blood. Was that you?”
“No, I’ve been staying on the inflatable bed.”
“I probably just washed it with colors or something. I’m still getting the hang of laundry. Hey, do you think you’ll have time to pick up my prescriptions tomorrow?”
I said I would, said I was tired, said I was glad he was back and said good night. I shut the door behind me so I wouldn’t have to hear too much of his TV and he wouldn’t have to hear too much of mine. On TV, they swore in the new president again and again. Some people were ecstatic. Others weren’t so sure. The Tylenol PM didn’t work so well and it was late by the time the TV stopped registering.
62.
Wednesday, January 21
On burying day, I was up with the sun. Sitting up in bed, I started crying right away, then laughed at myself—old Wake-and-Weep Monaghan. Dad was still sleeping, so I hit the road for some coffee and his pills. The CVS wasn’t far from the McDonald’s, so I stopped for breakfast. I ate a McMuffin and stared at the space where the playground used to be. Now it was just tables bolted to the concrete through the Astroturf. Beyond it, I watched Route 9 through the crotch of a golden arch. The memories were thick and I was anything but alone.
When I was four or five, Mom worked Saturday afternoons at a travel agency in the Filenes at the Worcester Galleria. And Dad would drive me out to that same McDonald’s in Westborough, then to his old friend’s butcher shop across from the WPI football field. We did it every weekend. Dad scared me when I was a kid—being huge and short-tempered. But those afternoons were a window into his mystery. In Worcester, Dad always ran into people who I’d never seen or heard of before. But I could feel the history hidden in their handshakes.
